long striped scarf

i designed this scarf to suit travis. he wanted a really long, striped scarf with several different colors. he said he didn't want ribs or anything -- he wanted the stitches to be very plain. i wanted the scarf to be durable and washable because hopefully he'll be wearing it all the time in the winters.

this scarf is over 5 feet long, so it took a while to knit, even though it's just a basic garter stitch. it's made of 5 different colors of red heart supersaver so it is a very inexpensive scarf to make despite the length (i probably used about $5 worth of yarn at most). i would have loved to knit him a scarf in organic, hand-dyed cotton or bamboo, but then the scarf would have cost like $75 dollars and wouldn't be as durable for constant use and repeated cleaning. i know it's not hip but sometimes cheap acrylics are the best choice.

one thing i learned while making this scarf is to make stripes with an even number of rows. each stripe here is 21 rows and this means that the stitches in the last row of each stripe section is actually made of two colors. what this ends up looking like is a thin contrasting line at the edge of each stripe section on the back of the scarf. it doesn't look bad, it actually kind of looks like it was intentionally done, but it means that the front and the back of the scarf aren't exactly the same, and that irritates me. (i'm the kind of person that likes everything to be even and symmetrical, not just in knitting but in real life.) it especially irritates me because i went to a lot of trouble to do a provisional cast-on so that both ends of the scarf would look the same - i don't like how cast-offs look different than cast-ons. oh well, it's all a learning process for me.