Well This Is Really Something

I just finished knitting the entire Scarf using the one skein of Willa yarn. I hadn't finished the project before I had decided the scarf is really too wide to fit around the neck nicely, so I already decided to undo the yarn and eliminate two pattern repeats. But I went ahead and knit the pattern to the end so I could try the "dropped stitch" and see what happened. I discovered several things.

1.  The dropped stitch is awesome, but makes the scarf wider than I wanted.
2.  The dropped stitch would help separate the cables and make them pop, but this particular design needed too many dropped stitches to really be effective for a short neck scarf. The total number of dropped stitches would make this short scarf way too wide.
3.  The dropped stitches, as planned, would be quite lovely in making a shawl, which would require adding another skein of yarn so it would drape around the shoulders and not just the neck. I could do this according to the contest rules, but I don't want to. I will keep this pattern design for later, however.

See how pretty this would be if it hung this way across the shoulders in a draped shawl?

Here you can see how the dropped stitch definitely added space between the cables.

This helped me see that I want the edges to be thicker so that a dropped stitch would not be good on the ends.

So now I am back to the "drawing board" to design another scarf pattern that will work for this one skein of yarn. It must be skinnier, which will make it longer.I still want to use the basic cable/rib design, but I must have space between each of them. Maybe I can add the dropped stitches if I don't use so many cables.
<brain whirl>