“Two Doctors” Scarves

A couple of years ago, when my step-mother’s health began to decline, I took to knitting extensively every time I visited her, in part as a coping mechanism to help me respond patiently to the repetitive questions sparked by her memory loss, and in part because it made her happy to have me completing her unfinished knitting projects and using her yarn remnants, which were gorgeous.

One of the projects that I knitted during that time was a long, striped scarf in a multitude of colours and textures, from a host of random bits of yarn. I started with a greenish fuzzy bit at the end and thought “this looks like it belongs in a Dr. Seuss book!” As I continued to knit and added stripes of different yarns into the mix, it looked even more like something out of a Seuss book, but it also started to bear a strong resemblance to a certain scarf worn by a certain 4th Doctor in a certain science-fiction television series… Yes, I am showing my geek stripes here, quite literally. 😉

Thus were born the “Two Doctors” scarves. Because of course, as soon as I started wearing that thing, everywhere I went people complimented it, and some people remarked that they wanted one of their own. Even non-geeks love that scarf! So I made a few, much wider and thicker this time in large part because I saw a great photo of Lenny Kravitz in this big, bold, long wrap scarf that reminded me of mine, and I thought “these scarves really should make the people wearing them feel like rock stars.”

Due to a couple of designers backing out at the last minute, I wound up showing these scarves in the TempleCon 2014 fashion show along with some of my arm-warmers, still thinking that they were just a fun little oddity, and not imagining that many people other than the occasional Whovian would really be interested in them. Boy, was I wrong.

This is a picture of me with three of my models from that show wearing the scarves and arm-warmers, taken by the wonderful Matt Norris. What you can’t see but might well imagine is how cold it was in early February, even inside the hotel, thanks to the doors constantly opening with people coming in and out. All of the other designers’ models were shivering and complaining about the cold, but my models were all happy and warm, and happy models like to talk about what is making them happy, especially when it’s clothing. 😉 What startled me though was the guy who immediately came up to us after the show asking about the scarves and wanting to know when and where he could buy one – he was just an ordinary-looking guy, nothing terribly flamboyant about him, and his interest in these scarves was a great challenge to my assumptions about my target audience for these scarves. I shouldn’t have been surprised though – the biggest fans of these things so far have been guys.

I didn’t get these up online to sell until recently, in large part because at the time of that show I didn’t even have this website built, and by the time I did it we were moving into summer, and who wants a scarf like this in hot weather? But by the end of summer I was already getting requests to start making more of these, so I’m finally getting around to posting them for sale in my Etsy shop. I’ve got a few up there now, with images taken by my lovely friend Stephanie Colato, and will get more up there as soon as we get the next batch photographed. 🙂