Dad's Scarf, Restarted

I finally got around to restarting my dad's scarf, and at first I really wanted to do the brioche stitch. It looks gorgeous, it's warm, and it looks masculine enough that I could give it to my dad. However, I don't know if the brown variegated yarn I'm using is just the wrong type of yarn, the needles I used were too big, I was messing it up, or the pattern just looks like that when it starts, but the first couple of inches of the scarf in the brioche pattern looked so bad that I ripped the whole thing apart and tried it twice more before I just gave up on the brioche stitch for now and went hunting for another pattern.

A lot of the other patterns I have in mind are either not great for scarves because they are one sided or they're kind of girly. While I wanted to do something that would be new for me, I also wanted to make something that my dad will actually wear, so I finally decided on a ribbed scarf with garter edges. It's 28 stitches across on US 10 needles and the pattern goes like this:
row 1: k4, p4,* repeat from * to last 4 stitches, k4
row 2: k4, *k4, p4* repeat between * until the last 8 stitches, k4, k4
So far, so good.

The way the ribs roll in as ribs do, I think it'll make a really warm scarf, and hopefully my dad will like it, especially after I've been working on the thing for years. I used a long-tail cast-on for the scarf, and I'm not wondering if that was really the right choice. I mean, it's not as if it can't stretch to the appropriate shape, but it is scrunched together as the end. I guess that'll just  be a problem for blocking to resolve.

Happy knitting!