Tag: Mary P. Hunt

Mammoth!

A giant woolly mammoth is approaching through the winter forest.

My other travel project has been a knit cowl from the same designed who made the Christmas Mystery Knit pattern. This one is the Woolly Giants Cowl (knit) by Mary P. Hunt. I dyed some Donegal DK in a light gray and chose some undyed MCN DK to knit up this lovely creature. However, once I completed the woolly rhino section at the bottom, I decided that the original colour was much too light. The Light picture actually shows it much better than real life did. So I ripped it all out and dyed a new skein of Donegal to a darker gray. The colour difference was now quite stark and it’s a lot easier to make out the different designs.

Darker version
Original light gray woolly rhinos
Light version
three balls of yarn in white, grey and darker grey
Yarns

Knitting this was very fun. I had a print out of the design and a pen and marked off every row completed. It took me a while, mainly because it was mostly in my bag waiting for travel time. Several people along the way were impressed with how such a project is worked, which was cool too.

Knitted cowl with a mammoth and a forest.
Knitted cowl with a mammoth and a forest.
Mammoth scarf on a mannequin

I feel like I am actually getting better at colour work. It seems a bit less .. lumpy than previous projects. I did make one change and omitted the triangles at the top. I thought it was already plenty high and I didn’t really like them. However, I do now believe that a little more white (or those triangles) would’ve made his head ‘end’ a little better. He’s going to be a fun neutral option, come winter.

Tales of the Tundra

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif.

While deciding what to do over the winter break, I was browsing Ravelry to see if there was a fun Mystery Knit along. As we’ve discovered, I like mystery anything-alongs and knitting fits in too. The last mystery knit along that I participated in is still not done, the clues had too many stitches to keep up with in the last three sections, so it’s now a travel project. But that wouldn’t hold me back.

There’s a forum called Upcoming MKAL/MCAL Calendar that lists MKALs that are going to start. There I found Tales of the Tundra Cowl (Knit) by Mary P. Hunt. The MKAL was set to start on the 25th of December, promised daily clues and 12 installments. I figured cowls aren’t enormous, and the other patterns that Mary P. Hunt has made are very cool, so this was setting up to be a good one.

Turquoise yarn with tag
Orange yarn with tag
Yellow spotted yarn with tag.

It required three yarns in DK weight with good contrast between A (main) and C (background) and some contrast with B too. I didn’t really feel like dyeing, so I dove into the hoard to find some yarn. I settled on Ultra DK in turquoise dyed in August 2023 for the main colour, Ultra DK with yellow spots dyed in September 2023 as the background and some DK 115 in orange from February 2025 as the contrast.

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 1
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 2
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 3

The pattern included some links to tutorials on colour dominance and jogless rounds and basically set us up for the project. This was super useful to just have in the document itself to refer back to.

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 4
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 5
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 6

Then the first clue dropped and we started knitting. The first section is corrugated ribbing, something I don’t recall having done before. However, it’s quite fun once you get into it. I got to use my relatively newly acquired skills with knitting left-handed to keep the yarns from tangling.

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 7
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 9
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 8

The second and third clue involved some pattern work where we made a cute design – it felt Scandivian inspired to me? And once clue three was done, we broke the B colour and continued with only two. I kept the blue in the left hand and the yellow in the right. I didn’t really see what was appearing as I was knitting it. I discovered the mountains from clue 4 and 5 only once I saw them in other people’s pictures on the forum.

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 10
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 11
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Clue 12.

I was also convinced for a while that the snout was from a bear, although it became clear along the way that it was actually a wolf. I guess the pattern image was a good hint towards that. Many people decided to duplicate stitch the eyes in a different colour, but I think that would make mine demonic looking, so I left that off. At some point, a paw print appeared in the sky too. Once the ears were done, the last three clues were almost mirrors of the first three.

Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Blocking.
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Inside.
Cowl in blues, yellows and oranges with wolf, mountains and paw print motif. Worn by a mannequin.

This project was great. I had a lot of fun discovering the pictures every day and most of the time there were only 7 rows to complete, which is totally doable. I did have to pay attention and count (not my strong suit), but with the help of the line tool in Adobe Reader, I managed to keep track of which row I was on. I’m definitely planning on joining more MKALs if they seem as doable as this one.