Traveling Scarf project

Last Thursday Ronnica invited me to join a Round Robin she's organizing on Ravelry, Scarf Travels.  The basic premise: you get assigned to a group of 10 knitters, cast on and knit 5 inches of your own scarf, and then each scarf gets mailed around the group and everyone knits 5" on each scarf.  We can be as vague (="crafter's choice") or control freak (= X pattern in Y yarn that the scarf's owner sends you) as we like.

I don't sign up for everything I read about on Ravelry, but this sounded like fun.  Ronnica assigned me to her group, the International group, which is cool 'cuz I'm mailing to Illinois.  Ronnica's mailing to me.  I wonder if we can do an in-person handoff when we do the meetup at the end of April?

The worst part is picking the parameters for my scarf.  First, I thought it would be cool to pick a pattern and let people chose the yarn they wanted to work with.  Then I started searching for a pattern... There's too many options, and at the same time nothing is screaming to me that I should pick it for my scarf.

At this point I'm tempted to go crafter's choice just so I don't have to deal, but last night I had an idea.  I think I am going with an Theme for my scarf - Water.  I think that most people live near a coast or a lake or an island continent like Australia ;).  Well, except for MissLucy out in Vegas, but there's always the Bellagio Fountain right?  I like the Morning Surf and Drop Stitch scarf patterns (and I dare you to find me the difference between them).  So, Drop Stitch scarf, blues/greens for yarn color, worsted weight... right?

Then I was thinking, what if I include a "get out of jail free" card, with a list of 5 ways that a knitter could break the rules: different color (x2), different pattern, different yarn weight, different stitch count/width.  If you sign your Rav userid on the card you get to break that one rule for your section, as long as you keep it ocean themed.  For example, instead of blue yarn maybe use bright red and white for "fish", or a deep purple for "seaweed".  Or a fingering weight yarn on huge needles to make the width stay the same.  Or switch to a different ocean-y stitch pattern for your 5". 

I'm basically trying to think of ways to allow free reign, but keep some uniformity throughout the scarf so it doesn't look completely patchworky and weird.  My other idea was tossing in 2 skeins of whatever I cast on with, and asking people to try and include an inch in my colors at some point in their section, to acheive color uniformity.

Now that I think  about it, it's going to be HARD to be the 9th and 10th knitter on a scarf, and try to make my sections match/go with all that have gone before...  Hehe, this is gonna be fun!