After knitting a duplicate of my gorgeous rainbow scarf and sending it off to a very special friend,
I felt, as I always do - almost like the feeling of finishing a very good book- rather empty, and I was itching to start another project. There are so many people I want to knit one of my special "heart scarves" for, so I decided to start at the top of my list, now that my whole family has one each. I also want to knit myself another scarf in black -you know- because black goes with everything!
But back to this scarf, it was not actually a scarf I had planned to knit. 
Then it dawned on me. Like the answer had been there all the time! She (my best friend) reminds me so much of the Cheshire Cat! She and I have a very long history of loving cats. We even adopted kitties from the same litter, many many years ago.
For my 40th birthday, she gifted me with these absolutely purrrrrrfect earrings!
However, like the Cheshire Cat, this scarf proved to be JUST as "trixy" as the Cheshire Cat himself!. Good heavens!
It was definitely going to be a striped scarf, which had me counting rows, changing wool, and ensuring the "hemlines" of each colour change ended up on the same side of the scarf!
I managed to drop stitches everywhere, and there was a lot of swearing involved. Additionally, although I have made this mistake before and I am always so careful not to repeat it, I did not have enough wool for the cast-off at the end! I managed to find some black wool at the bottom of my bag, but it STILL wasn't enough. I grabbed another piece of what I thought was black wool that turned out to be grey, and it looked awful.
First I tried covering it up with tassels, but the grey still found a way to poke through the gaps, so I abandoned that idea.
Eventually I started hacking away at the scarf. At first, it was just supposed to be directly under the cast-off line so that I could pick up the stitches as I went along, but that turned into a disaster; stitches disappeared on me, just as I thought I'd hooked them! Then, aside from the dropped stitches, I realised that the line I had cut ran between two rows of stitches, so that was a disaster!
The scarf was originally supposed to start and end with black wool, but I had to abandon that idea after I had managed to hack my way through an entire stripe (20 rows) of black stitches!
I managed to "successfully" capture the stitches of the purple row below, but really, "successfully" is a very loose term here 馃う
After I had completed my cast-off, I then did some damage control, tying stitches to other stitches to cover up the holes that the dropped stitches had left behind.
Goodness gracious. This scarf was certainly a test of my patience and almost saw me give up several times, but I persevered, and I think it turned out to look very pretty after all!
