Cowl Details

I was asked about the details of the cowl I just made, and it's actually pretty easy to answer, which suits my attention span these days perfectly, so here we go.

After I bought the yarn, I did a search on Ravelry for patterns that might suit both the type and amount I had, and one of the ones I flagged was a pattern called the French Cowl. It's a free pattern, and it's very straightforward, being a two-row repeat. I did make a few modifications, though.

First, the pattern calls for most of the stitches to be purls, and I just wasn't in the mood, so I knit them instead. The way it comes out when knit, the "wrong" side looks very much like the right side would if purling. I like both sides equally, so it works for me.

I cast on 100 stitches on a 16-inch circular needle, size 8 US, and then did this:

1. K3, YO, slip-one-knit-one-pass slipped stitch over, repeat all the way around.
2. K3, K2tog, YO,  repeat all the way around.

The pattern calls for increasing at a certain point and knitting an at the wider width, but I liked the size/width as it was (at one point I put it on waste yarn so I could test how well it went over my head and fit), so I just did the same size all the way.

When I was almost out of yarn, I started to bind off, and at first I was doing a stretchy bind off, but I was also running out of yarn too fast, so I took a look at what I was getting, and decided that it was way stretchier than I need it to be. So I tinked back and just bound off regular, and ended up with a good match to the size/stretch of the cast-on, and just a wee bit of yarn left over.

Perfect.