Tag Archives: cowl

New pattern – With a Twist Cowl

My first pattern of 2015 is published today in Knit Now Magazine (Issue 44).

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Photo: Dan Walmsley – Practical Publishing

Ravelry Pattern Page

It’s a neck-hugging cowl, perfect for the snowy weather we are having in the UK at the moment! It features reversible cables, so you can fling it on in a hurry, safe in the knowledge that you won’t be wondering around with it on inside out 🙂

With a Twist Cowl

It can be worn with the top folded down, or as a tube to keep as much of you warm as possible.

The cowl was knitted using Emrys Bluefaced Leicester Aran by Triskelion Yarn and Fibre. The yarn was a delight to knit with, a great colour (Hafren) and very very squishy.

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From the original prototype that I made I thought that it would be touch and go to make the cowl from one skein. There was an awful lot of knitting a round, weighing the cowl, weighing the remaining yarn, crossing fingers etc. When, after all that worry, the finished cowl used 90g of yarn, I was mightily relieved!

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From Fibre to FO (a rare event)!

A couple of months ago I purchased some ‘hotchpotch’ packs of fibre from Helen at My Heart Exposed Yarns (www.folksy.com/shops/myheartexposed).  I used one pack to experiment with corespinning and over Christmas I put the other pack of blue shades to good use.

Another rare event happened before Christmas – I won a prize in a raffle!  It was bath goodies and came wrapped in some lovely paper:

I used the paper as inspiration for creating the yarn.  The ‘hotchpotch’ was mainly shades of blue with a bit of plum thrown in – I added some blue merino and some brown mystery fibre that I received in a waste selection from www.worldofwool.co.uk.

Once carded together they looked like this:

and I even remembered to write down the ingredients:

 

It started to go slightly downhill from here…  The fibre was great to spin, I navajo plied it and got an aran weight yarn.  The mix of colours began to get a bit muddy looking for my tastes:

 Again, I remembered to note down some of the vital facts…

I adapted the stitch pattern from the Spiral Mitts I knitted before Christmas and made a squishy cosy cowl:

I’m still not 100% sure about the way this turned out, but hey, I actually finished something!

Warm and toasty

My first project using a batt I created is now finished:

I made three batts of various orange/rust/gold/brown shades of merino blended with some copper coloured trilobal nylon.  Each batt has a slightly different style – one was layered, one was randomly blended and the other graduated from dark to light across the batt.  Each batt became a single and resulted in a worsted-ish three ply yarn. 

The colours lent themselves well to the Candle Flame cowl (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/candle-flame-cowl) – I managed to complete two and a half repeats of the pattern and squish in a couple of purl rows and end up with a yard or two of yarn left over – result!