For the first time ever, I participated in a Mystery Knit-a-long (MKAL) last month. A KAL is a project where you get some part of the instructions and should complete those in a set time period. Mystery just means that you haven’t got a clue what the end result is going to be.
Sometime in September, I saw the announcement for the Cowltopus MKAL by Laura Nelkin, an MKAL that was to take place in October. It was on sale and it seemed like a fun idea, and I really like octopuses, so what could go wrong? Well, I forgot about it until about two days after the first clue came out and I hadn’t done any of the prep work. The prep included finding the right yarn and swatching it. I found the yarn I wanted to use, but it still needed to be dyed.
The pattern calls for DK weight yarn around 225 m/100 grams. There should be a main colour and a contrast colour, and both can be composed of mini skeins or just a single colour skein. There should be contrast between the MC and CC and gradients are encouraged. So I looked on the internet for different kinds of octopuses and settled on the quite elusive Glass Octopus Vitreledonella richardi. To match the inspiration, my MC was one full skein of Ultra DK in light blue. For the contrast, I chose to split a skein of Ultra DK into four section and dye them in a gradient from yellow to chestnut/brown.
Once the yarn had dried, the gauge swatch got going. The swatch indicated that I had to size up my needles a little because I couldn’t get gauge otherwise. The first clue had come out on October 3rd, and was supposed to be done by the time clue 2 would be released a week later. I managed to get my yarn dyed and swatch ready by the 7th. On the 13th, I finished clue 1, to get right back on with clue 2.
Clue 2 went really smoothly and was actually finished on time, done by the 14th. This wasn’t super challenging yet, so I sailed right through it. The only new things were magic knots and needing to pay attention to the stitches. The third clue was where it got interesting. There were two options, brioche knit or ribbing. So I decided to learn something new and got going on the brioche. It wasn’t as scary as I was worried about. The instructions and video companion were very helpful and it all went according to plan.
Clue 4 was the last clue and where we were finishing the cowl – that turned out to be a hood. It was more brioche but now with waves in it. Actually quite fun to knit! The pattern is designed in a way that you shouldn’t run out of yarn unless you choose to ignore the instructions – my bad. I was supposed to start the end with 4 grams remaining, but I had 3.6 grams of yarn left. In the end, I had to tie in 15 cm of leftover yarn from the dying process to get the last few stitches finished.
I enjoyed learning new things and not knowing exactly what was going to happen throughout the KAL. I’m not discounting doing one again even though the resulting hood isn’t totally my style. I’m very happy that one of my colours was solid, because the finished hoods from other knitters are overwhelmingly busy. I’ve not found much reason to wear it yet, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. Sometimes having a fun process is more important than having a good result.
One thought on “Cowltopus”