Just finished a new infinity, in pale pastel colors that bring to mind the famous French cookies. Here, start to finish, Macarons.

I began with five skeins of Koigu Premium Painters Palette Merino:

Left to right: colors P204C, 0029 (dyed for Webs), P480, P516, and P344

I chose to make this using the magic ball technique. Though this technique is a great way to use up odds and ends of yarn to make a truly randomly striping ball, in this case I began with the full skeins, which I planned to work in narrow, repeating stripes. I needed just shy of 100 grams of yarn for the infinity, so I wound off eight smaller, equal balls (about 9.5 g each except the yellow), and one larger ball of yellow (about 15 g), to form a wider stripe in the middle of the scarf.

I wound the balls in this order: pink, purple, blue, green, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink. As I wound the magic ball, I spliced the ends of each of the smaller balls together. I like to use a Russian join-- neat and strong! This very helpful tutorial explains the process. Here, I have secured the first loop and I'm ready to make the second loop (the loops are made by weaving the threaded yarn back on itself):

Next, I made the second loop and I'm ready to pull the join tight:

Ta da! The two ends are now securely joined. Later, after I finished knitting the scarf, I went back and trimmed the excess tails. Here, then is my now 98-gram magic ball of yarn, spliced, wound, and ready to cast on:

I used my usual recipe: 325 stitches on US #8 needles, worked in the round in linen stitch. Because I made a magic ball, the stripes unwound in order as I knit. Note that the joins occurred randomly, not necessarily at the beginning of a round, but for this scarf that was not an issue.

So, for the next several weeks, I picked up this scarf whenever I had a few spare minutes, or hours, to knit. I brought it to an all-day meeting

and took advantage of a rare warm, sunny day to do some knitting on the porch

I bound off the scarf several days ago but had to wait until yesterday so I could block it outside (like I said, warm sunny days have been very scarce this spring!):