Doctor Who thing of the day: sophisticated TARDIS scarf

Kate Atherley, tech editor at Knitty, tells a terrible tale of oppression:

When I was a teenager, I insisted my mother knit me a Doctor Who scarf. Although the colors weren’t precisely right, it was exactly what I wanted: an absurdly long, multicolored scarf with a generous fringe. I wore it for years. And years. I was still wearing it when I finished university and started my first proper job.

One cold winter day, a coworker made a comment in passing. I am certain he meant it to be helpful advice, but it stung more than he could know. He said that the scarf was childish, and if I wanted to be taken seriously in my career I needed to dress the part. The scarf got put away, and I spent more than 10 years dressing conservatively for a career that I never quite fit into.

Horrible. (And if you take a look at Atherley’s headshot at the bottom of this Knitty page, you can see that the scarf isn’t particularly Who-ish: it’s just funky and fabulous. I pity the small unfunky minds that cannot cope with it.) But Atherley turned it around and used it as inspiration. It led her to create her wonderful “sophisticated, grown-up take on the Doctor Who scarf”: