It’s a bit of a surprise to me that I finished hemming the last two silk scarves this week. I expected that impatience or a sore back would get the better of me, and I’d end up tossing one or two of them into a corner somewhere until the memory of hemming silk faded enough for me to put myself through it all again.

What saved me was the sewing machine manual. It had a couple of stitch suggestions. The first was an automatic stitch for finishing lingerie. I tried this out on the purple scarf:

It gave the edge a scalloped effect. Not as tidy as hand stitching, but decorative enough to do the job. After that I got the courage up to try a simple narrow zig zag on the last scarf:

I had to cut of the first attempt, as it formed a hard, inflexible edge. Once I knew I’d have to cut that first edge off anyway, I lengthened the stitch as I went until I was happy with the result. Then I cut it off and did the whole scarf. The finish is simpler and tidier than the lingerie edge, so I like it better.

The other wip I finished was the green woven scarf.

The yarn is handspun (not mine) that I’d knit into a mobius scarf, but then frogged. It’s a very dark green with a thread of silver through it.

Weaving made it into a much nicer scarf.

Finally, I got one of my wips off the list another way. I decided that if I really didn’t want to crochet a few more squares, and wasn’t keen to have another lap rug, then what was the point of finishing this one? The crochet blanket squares were frogged, and the bonus was that each was made from one unbroken thread so I didn’t wind up with lots of short lengths as I’d expected:

I have several ideas floating around for what I’ll use the yarn for instead. It’s Cleckheaton Country, which is a good basic yarn that will work for many kinds of projects. But for now it goes back into the stash.