Something from (Almost) Nothing

It's hot as the dickens here in the city. When it's this infernal outside, it's best to hide inside and look for cool, quiet things to do. So I riffled through my leftover yarns and made something from (almost) nothing!

If you knit or crochet, invariably you end up with little scraps of leftover yarn. Usually I turn the washable yarn bits into patchwork afghans for several charities in my neighborhood (more on that some other day). But my bits of dry-clean-only yarns aren't suitable for charity. So yesterday I took a solitary mini-skein of hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn from Santa Fe sheep:

Oh, look! a random pug hair! One of 10,000 that float around my house at any given moment. Here's a closeup:

Anyway, I plucked the pug hair off the Santa Fe yarn and combined said yarn with a little bit of fancy, fuzzy stuff:

And made an incredibly short knit scarf. It's just enough to go around your neck and not much more. But I created a buttonhole in one end of the scarf, and then picked through my collection of blue buttons:

...until I found this one, a big, fat, vintage one from a friend's shuttered needlework store:

I sewed the button on the opposite end of the scarf from the buttonhole to create this...umm, what would you call it? Short scarf? Knit dickie? Fuzzy cravat? I don't know what to name it, but come the cold weather (yes, we do get cold weather in L.A.), it will nicely fill in the neckline of a jacket or coat. And it'll do it without being all long and droopy and catch-in-the-spokes-of-your-motorcar-ish, with apologies to Isadora Duncan:

Yeah, it looks a little odd wearing it with a summer tee shirt. But it was 98 degrees on my porch!

I'm jazzed with the way this turned out, and I have approximately 90-gazillion other yarn bits to use up. Today I'm working on a black-and-white polka-dotted yarn, and if it turns out well, I'll show you that one tomorrow.