Last year CRAFT Magazine commissioned me to design a Valentine's Day crochet pattern.  I designed the Crochet Heart Scarf for them.  If you want the free pattern, click on over.

What I didn't have a chance to show you last year, were all the rejected crochet heart scarf designs.  I shot these photos as I was designing on the couch, so the photos are sort of crap, but I think they prove that I put everything I have into making sure the scarf was everything I wanted it to be ... soft, light-weight, supple (not stiff), and with a recognizable heart motif.

Some of these are sort of cute, but too bulky or stiff.  Some just suck.  All of them were a part of the path for getting to my final design.  I couldn't have skipped any of them.  Not even when I almost gave up and thought, "Hey, why not just surface crochet the damn hearts on single crochet."  Ha!  

In the last photo, you can see in the swatch on the right that at the end I was messing around with the connector thread placement to get them exactly where I wanted them.