The less is more thing

For the most part, I'm a firm believer in simple elegance. Classic lines, small accents, that sort of thing. I do occaisionally believe in the more the better, especially when it involves things being warm in the winter. You know, like I love a nice, big, warm sweater, a fluffy coat, a thick scarf. Ofcourse, like all things, you can go too far. In my world, a 10" scarf is too far. Especially when it has the potential to be even bigger despite the best of blocking efforts.
Last night I was working on ye olde Midwest Moonlight and couldn't believe how huge it was. The only way it fit on my needle was by squishing it down, and then it had this huge ruffle in it. Everytime I turned my work and straightened it out, I had a doubt. All I could think is that I was spending all this time on this scarf, who's color I wasn't sure about, and who's width had gotten out of hand. Ofcourse, I didn't know what out of hand was, exactly, and couldn't stand to work on it any further without knowing for sure. 25 hours on a project is a committment, and you want it to have good results. To me, anything wider than 9" is bordering on a stole or wrap, and that's not what I was looking for. So, I took the thing and pinned the crap out of it to see what I could remove from the width by stretching it, and the results are what you see above. Too damn big. Even Sunshine agrees that it's too large. I mean look at her face, she's not pleased.
So I looked at the picture and I'm thinking it doesn't look this wide. But in reality it is, because in the picture, much of scarf is tucked under - you really only see 2 and little bit of the 3rd repeats. Wow, the picture is misleading. What a shocker. [end sarcasm] So I pulled the pins out of the scarf, grabbed the other skein of this color and some size US7s (a step larger from the US 6s I used on this) and started knitting again, but this time with only 2 repeats and this is what I got. Much smaller, much more reasonable, and hey! much faster. Thank goodness for that. As I figure, based on the speed I was doing the first one, it was taking me 1 hour a repeat - times that by the number required and you get 25 hours. This is taking me just under 40 mins. a repeat - times 26 repeats (I'm adding one to comepensate for the lesser amount of stretch I get out of it because it's not as wide) and we get just under 17.5 hours. This is so much better for me because:
a) I dont' know when this need to be done by and b) I still have half of another scarf and a whole other one to complete before this unkown deadline. As you can tell by the shock on the face of the great Jordini here, this little adventure is ill advised. However, with only 15 more hours on this project and 13 more hours on the other scarf and probably 15 to 20 hours on the last one, I'll be done in no time! Riiiiiight. If you're definition of "no time" is in fact either
a) done by sometime in the year 2050
b) a span of 48 non consecutive hours (or more)

Then yes, I'll be done in no time.
(You'd better stop making faces like that at me or it's going to stick that way!)