four square walls: circle infinity scarf

Who doesn't like a nice warm circle scarf for fall? Here's one I made from colorful knit fabric:

My infinity scarf is considerably less infinite than many others out there, partly because I don't like drowning in a vast sea of fabric but mostly because I ran out of yardage.

I bought this knit because I liked the colors and it had a more interesting design than any knit I'd ever seen at Joann's. The girl cutting the fabric said, "Yeah it's kinda cool but I wouldn't wanna look at it all the time." Then she proceeded to tell me about the purple tulle she was making a skirt out of. To each her own.

I originally tried to make a simple short-sleeved dress out of it, but accidentally chopped the hem way too short and couldn't bear to wear it as a bulky pocketed short-sleeve shirt. The knit is heavy and sweatshirty -- not good for a dress anyway -- but is too cozy to waste. So I dutifully seam-ripped it apart, and salvaged enough yardage (in increments) to create what would become a circle scarf.

I stitched together each small section to create a long single layer of fabric. It ended up measuring over 9 feet long, yikes:

I've seen some tutorials that just stitched together the two short edges here and called it a day (see Come On, Ilene!), but I didn't want the wrong side to be exposed at all when I wore it. My crappy scissors hack at my fabric, so even on a knit the raw edges look bad. So I folded the scarf in half lengthwise (right sides together) and stitched the long edge, leaving the short ends open so I could turn it right side out. It's essentially a (really) long tube.

I then brought the two ends together to form a large circle. I wanted a clean seam to close the loop, so I stitched the two ends, right sides together, as much as it would allow me (you can't go all the way around as it is). This formed a little gap that I had to hand-stitch closed.

So once I sewed, it looked like this on one side:

And this on the other:

I whipstitched the opening closed, making sure the raw edges were folded under. There's probably a better hand stitch out there that would be less noticeable, but since this is a scarf that is bundled up anyway, I didn't worry about small imperfections.