YO,* a scarf for this season

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere (as at least nine out of ten UChicago alumni do), today is the first day of winter. The higher your latitude, the lower the temperature is likely to be, and the higher the chances are that you didn’t leave home this morning without a scarf.

Which is where we come in. A few autumns ago, dreading the slings and arrows of Chicago winters, the University of Chicago Magazine commissioned knitting doyenne Silvia Harding, X’78, to design a University of Chicago scarf for readers to make for themselves or for the less-crafty Maroons in their lives.

Web stats tell us that from January 1, 2007, through December 19, 2010, the website Knitting Pattern Central has sent some 6,324 knitters our way. But if looking for a pattern were the same as knitting it, we'd all be waist-high in sweaters, hats, and fingerless gloves. So the question that has us knitting our brows is this: how many readers have taken up needles and yarn in response?

Show us your handiwork. If you didn't follow Harding's instructions to a C, that only means you're being true to your school.

Mary Ruth Yoe

* YO, or "yarn over," as the knitting cognoscenti know.

What’s different about the 2010 scarf modeled here? Sharon Kelly (co-owner, with sister Kathleen Kelly, AB’94, of Arcadia Knitting) brightened the C-stripe of the original design to creamy white.

December 21, 2010