I started watching Doctor Who in the winter of 2011 and pretty much fell in love immediately. Completely by coincidence, this was right around the time when knitting FINALLY clicked in my head and I could get past the cast on. Obviously, I needed to marry these two new-found loves in some way, and when I first saw the famous Fourth Doctor’s magnificent scarf, I knew that I had to knit it.

I did a little research and found wittylittleknitter.com and doctorwhoscarf.com. I finally settled on knitting the “Shada” scarf because it was long and I might suffer from a slight case of height complex.

It took me a lot longer to find the right yarn than it did to actually knit the damned scarf. I decided to knit the entire thing in Caron Simply Soft because it was readily available, came in a ton of colors, and I was familiar with it. The colors aren’t completely accurate (the green isn’t really brown enough, the yellow is too pale, and the gray could stand to be a little darker and more bluish), but I actually love how well they work together, and it’s still very obvious that it’s a Doctor Who scarf. I ran out of the brown color (nutmeg) part way through because the only skein I could find was half the size of all the others, and when I went to order more, I found that it had apparently been discontinued, forcing me to scour the internet for the last semi-reasonably priced skein on ebay to finish the scarf. It was a very panicky day for me.

In total, I probably spent about a month and a half knitting. I had to take plenty of breaks to nurse swollen fingers, broken skin, and aching joints, but on a good day I could knock out six inches to a foot. It was probably about 17 days worth of actual knitting. The last time I measured, it was about 15 feet long without tassels and 16 with. It’s stretched quite a lot since then, what with wearing it and draping it across my headboard.

The scarf is unbelievably soft and warm. It took a few tries before I found the best way to wear it. Unfortunately, there were very few extremely cold days this winter where such a scarf was necessary, but I did get a couple chances to wear it, and every time I did, I ended up in very long, lovely conversations with strangers over the construction and back story, which I was more than happy to explain. I even got a few people interested in both knitting and Doctor Who.

I’m really holding out hope for a cooler winter next year so I can wear my scarf out more.

Techniques learned: weaving in ends as you work, adding tassels