Done!  It took forever to start this, but once I started (yesterday afternoon), I quickly finished it (around midnight last night in a Gilmore Girls-athon).  Overall, I'd say that I'm pretty pleased with this.  Once I got started, it wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be, and it was easy to keep track of rnd 1 or rnd 2 of the fisherman's rib pattern in the round simply by watching the stitches for signs.  So, generally a mindless knit.  I was fascinated at how this made up, as I wouldn't have ever dreamed of doing a scarf like this myself in this stitch pattern, but the fisherman's rib is so very fluffy in La Bohème.  And who can't appreciate a project that only takes one hank of this yarn??

Technical notes:  Lu pointed me in the direction of these knitting videos , which we should all bookmark for once and for all. Thanks, Lu!  (Now you see why I like to start knit-alongs ... purely from a selfish perspective!)  This is what I needed to figure out how to "purl into the stitch below".   Meanwhile, check out what this looked like just before I bound off:

Interesting, don't you think? One loooong narrow tube.  In the finishing which wasn't really binding off, I left WAY too much slack in the yarn which I'm not entirely happy with, but I think I can play around with it to fix it up.  You may notice that one edge of the scarf has really loopy edge stitches -- that's the BO side.

How does it look?  Well .... as a scarf, I'm not sure it'll get much use.  Nor as a cowl.  But as a little summer poncho-ette, to go over a certain strapless dress that I always wear to summer weddings??  I think that there's a strong possibility there.  If you're still thinking of making this, I'd consider a lighter weight yarn paired with a strand of laceweight mohair or alpaca; I think it'd give a similar effect without breaking the bank.  Overall, I'm pretty pleased.