In December, I dyed a skein of yarn (Chester Wool Ultra Aran) in dark blue with orange/brown specks to match my dinosaur coat. The plan was to make a cowl that would go with it, to protect my neck from the cold and wind. There is a lot of wind where I live, so this seemed like a necessity. I did already have a cowl, but it was much wider than this new one I was planning. After searching through Ravelry, I settled on the Whirl Me Away Cowl by Samantha Main.
The instructions indicate to replace the left needle tip with a thinner one, so it’s easier to pick up the stitches. So that’s what I did, the right needle was 6 mm and the left 4.5mm. It actually did help a lot with catching the stitches. I cast on 121 stitches and did the stitch pattern indicated until I felt like it was long enough. This took forever! The stitch pattern is very slow even though you’re theoretically knitting big stitches. Once it reached over my mouth, I started deviating from the pattern and cast on extra stitches on the sides in order to create a sort of flared base. This was pure improvisation, the amount of stitches cast on, the amount of rows between etc, it was all seat of the pantsing.
Once the main knitting was completed, I needed to bind off. I tried at least 4 different methods but they all flared too much and didn’t look good. I didn’t want to do a sewn bind off because they take for ever, and I was at a roller derby game. At some point I decided on the plan, and lost yarn chicken by about 10 stitches. So I took the entire bind off out again, frogged some stitches back and redid the cast off. Project done, you’d think. But no. There were some white spots on the cowl where I didn’t put enough dye on the resists initially. So I dunked the finished project in some water, put new dye on those white spots and steamed the whole thing. It was so much better afterwards. I’ve worn this thing almost every day since it was finished. I’ll definitely call this a success!
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