What's My Motivation? MY OWN SELFISH NEED FOR A NEW SCARF!

Backstory

Pattern: Vogue Lace Leaf Scarf from Spring/Summer 2005
Yarn: Katia Austral from the stashette
Needles: Size 5 Bryspun circular needles [until they met their untimely demise] and size 5 Addi circulars
Exposition: This was supposed to be a holiday gift. It still is a holiday gift, but I'm the lucky recipient. The tragedy of knitting beautiful things, huh?

The Katia Austral is one of the first yarns that I bought off eBay. It's a 50% merino, 50% acrylic and is a very nice yarn to work with. I also used it for the yellow Rowan Cloud and I must say, I don't have a single complaint with how it's holding up. I still have 7 balls that are destined to become a very sassy Hopeful.

The knitting was fairly straightforward with the scarf being knit in two halves and grafted together...and once I started the second half, I pretty much had the pattern memorized. It does need a little blocking, but I was too excited to wear it, so blocking will come later. I will be revisiting this pattern soon, this time, it might make it into a gift box for some deserving person...maybe in a larger gauge with two pattern repeats or in a softy mohairy yarn.
I was a little concerned about the grafting together. I didn't really want the two patterns meeting right down the middle of the scarf. So, I knitted one full ball of the Katia, which yielded about 10 pattern repeats then started in on the second half, which took up about a ball and a half and yielded about 15 repeats. I also didn't end exactly where the instructions instructed. I actually knit a row or two extra. OOPS! I ran out of yarn on the first side before the specified row and didn't feel like frogging on the second half when I past the specified row. Lastly, since I'm fairly new at the concept of grafting, I just grafted straight across all the stitches. How would you graft in a pattern anyway? I guess I did a pretty good job, since the seam doesn't look as lame as I thought it would.