I never knitted a beaded scarf...or a beaded anything before. Tracy of Interlacements asked me to make a sample of it for her. I'm crossing my fingers I can either wear it or have it displayed at Stitches West in February! If I can stop having way too much homework to finish it. I took my knitting to New Orleans hoping to get a little bit of it finished, instead, I built a library and taught kindergarten. (Not that I'm complaining...NOLA was AMAZING!)
This is a picture of the group outside of the school we taught at: Morris Jeff Community School in New Orleans, LA. After we took this picture, I learned the Super Dome is right down the street. My peers weren't surprised, they just smiled and acknowledged that it is true: I really don't always play with a full deck. Nevertheless, they accept me for the Church/Knitting/Missing Crayons in the Box type of person I am:) Plus they think I'm funny!!! 
From Left to Right: Tim, Carrie, Andrea, eM, Rachel, Katie B, Brittany, Katie H, Dr. Meidl, Lauren and Noelle. We were outside of the main office at Morris Jeff School on our last day there:( We miss it!
Since we were pretty much full time teachers...the whole "knitting durning down time" turned into eating Binnets at the French Quarter and sleeping in a hostile with 45 other people. Sleep was a luxury and didn't happen for more than 5 hours at a time. Which explains why I didn't knit anything during that trip.
Like I said, great time, just not a lot of knitting time. Hence, I'm behind.
Currently, I'm about a 1/3 way done with it. My goal is to finish before Stitches 2011!!
Before you can start knitting, you have to get the beads onto the yarn. you tape down the beads and then string them on. You normally do this on a hard surface away from dogs. Unless your name is Zoe, then you try to do that on a soft couch. ;)
It takes a long time to work on because there are so many beads to move. As you can see from the picture above, you have your yarn on a big cardboard spool. You unravel the yarn, push the beads back and then wind it back up and knit again. You think you pushed it far enough back...and guess what... you did NOT! Good news though, the more you knit with it, the quicker the bead moving becomes. It becomes habit and you can estimate how many rows you are going to be going through before you need to wind up again. It just takes time to figure out. You become a pro at moving beads and since you use beads in every row, you have less beads to work with as you knit more of the scarf.
Knitting with beads is hard, at least at first. I felt very clumsy while trying to perfect the knitted ridges of the scarf. Now that I have past the decreases, it is a lot more flowing than before. We shall see when I cast on for the other side if I am as clumsy.
Supposedly, solid colors are in fashion this year. At first I was a little discouraged about the colors. Black Tiny Toes Yarn and Black Metallic beads...it's like I'm knitting for my mom again:/ But, I was wrong and love the make up of the scarf. I think it looks classy and artistic at the same time. It's like my mom and my fashion sense combined into one!
This scarf is really pretty and feels great to knit up. You can check out kits to make this scarf at the Interlacements Yarn Website.
