FO: Noble Cowl

A quick but luxurious little lace cowl....

It's the yarn that makes it.  A luxurious, brilliantly dyed (yet sadly discontinued) skein of Schaefer Yarn Helene, a super soft and shiny single comprised of merino and silk.  Heavenly.  Cuddle it close and never let it go.  

 The colors are brilliant- reds, pinks, peaches.  Reds are the toughest color to photograph, so I feel like this really doesn't do the subtleties in tones justice.

Originally, this was going to be for a friend "in the know", who would totally notice that I failed to make a gauge swatch before beginning, running out of yarn before I could finish the last lace repeat and unceremoniously cast off the cowl failing to make a full repeat.  Chop chop!  Should have gone down a needle size.  It still looks just fine....I wasn't about to rip the whole thing back or anything.  My solution was simpler:  simply gift it to someone less likely to notice who doesn't read my blog.  Genius, I am.

T 

The pattern is called the Noble Cowl, and it is free.  It makes for a lovely gift and only took me a couple days to whip up.

FO: Les Misérables

A friend gifted me a spectaularly special ball of yarn last year. Filatura Di Crosa Superior, a cashmere-silk blend, soft and lofty and fine, in the most alluring color of lipstick red.



I got to work right away on an appropriate pattern- something lacy and lovely.  I found this pattern online and got to work.  Although it called for 900+ yards of yarn for a large scarf, but I figured I would just sew up the scarf to make a cowl when I ran out of yarn as I only had 330 yards.

So miserable.

The pattern is easy- a series of yarn overs with dropped stitches lined up, to give it a carelessly destroyed and distressed look to it.  Still..It's cashmere silk blend!  You can't make it look bad.  Once you were done, you give it a good felting to firm up the fabric.  I did this rather ingeniously, as I had finished it while I was living in a hotel with no real way to felt it or let it dry....I used it as a bath puff for a couple days.  Soap, water, agitation, et voila.  It felted it perfectly evenly, it's super soft and surprisingly warm for something so full of air bubbles.

FO: Honey Cowl

Meow.

Ages ago, I fell in love with a skein of yarn. It's called "Kitten" from Tess Designer Yarns up in Portland. Cashmere Silk blends are easy to fall in love with. Ethereally soft, shiny and slinky with a gentle bloom, with lovely hand-dyed colors. I couldn't justify a splurge and I had to walk away just after petting until "friends" stepped in and dragged me away with my heels firmly digging up furrows of mud behind me.

So when a friend sent me a special care package with a skein of Kitten, I somehow managed to swoon and squeal with delight at the exact same moment. Epic.

What to do with this 325 yards of pure love and joy and happiness?

A honey cowl!

I felt that with yarn this special needs to be kept close, with no risk of it sliding off your neck to be tromped upon on the Metro, or forgotten draped across the back of a seat at the movie theater. A cowl with a simple stitch pattern was called for: it won't go anywhere.

I cast on 220 stitches and knit till the yarn was gone. It's lovely. It reminds me of said friend everywhere and anywhere I take it. It can be worn as one giant loop, or doubled up when it's particularly dreary out for a bit more warmth.

I will wear it always.

Scarves

Right before I packed up and moved from Brooklyn, I had an insane urge to make a few bulky-yarn projects in order to:

1. Use up the bulky-yarn stash. I think all new knitters go through a phase where the answer is "bulky yarn" to all their yarn questions. It's fast all right. But damn, if you could get something to look flattering on something other than a waif, you deserve an award.

2. Justify my use of knitting time as making visual progress at a time when I felt like I was getting no where and spending my days on endless hold-music calls. Most of these things were all knitted in the course of an afternoon, and in one case, in the time it took for AT&T to dick me around and not resolve anything at all, even though I was asking nicely.

First up: a handspun cowl. It started out as a braid of Corriedale/Alpaca blend from Spunky Eclectic in the "Thunderstorm" colorway.

Great colors...nice and moody.

Spun it up as a chunky 2-ply.

Then I learned a fantastic new technique...the Mobius cowl.

It's a little tricky to get started, but it's simple once you do it. Randomly altering your knit and purl rows makes for interesting texture, and there are tons of different ways to make this your own.

I loved it so much, I went ahead and dug up bags of scarps of some Rowan Biggy Print (which may or may not have been in my stash for more than 7 years) and made a stripy, ultra bulky one on size 17 needles.

It's enormously warm, and I love the texture that the thick-and-thin yarn produced. I randomly alternated the two colors I had until I ran out of yarn, and poof! it's magic! Really, it would have been pushing it if I invested two hours in this.

So I kept on rolling with the Biggy Print, and made a mistake-rib scarf with what I had left:

The pattern (if you could call it that) is Franciose from "French Girl Knits". Mine came out short, so a pin or a button might be added at some point.

One more:

A VERY GLITZY alpaca batt from Loop!

I bought this ages ago, when I first started spindle-spinning. 2006 or '07. I spun it up pretty quickly, but then the yarn just sat in a bin for all these years. Shameful!

Spun up and plied, I only had 74 yards.

So I made a wee necktie out of it, based on this pattern (which called for laceweight yarn).

It does need a good blocking, but it used up all my yarn. Mission accomplished.

I felt clean and purged when that was done. No more odd skeins of overweight yarn to slow me down! Overly warm neckware to the rescue.

FO: Well, This Wasn't Exactly How I Pictured Things.

The race to knit down my stash has new urgency. I can't move across an ocean and bring it all with me.



This beast, for example. It was supposed to be a hat. I don't know if the skein of yarn I had was a defect, but there was only 45 yards in the skein. It was supposed to have 110 yards.



It was supposed to be the Unoriginal Hat and now it's a cowl with a cable pattern.



Or a really warm headband. Your choice!



The yarn is Creative Focus Chunky by Nashua Handknits- 75% wool and 25% Alpaca. Methinks this might have been a sample skein or a dud, because it ended up being about half the weight that the label says. Sad face. Lemons make really nice lemonade though, especially when you dump a load of sugar syrup in. I'll stick with that story. Unforgivably, this isn't the softest yarn either- maybe not something you want right up close to your skin like that. I'm pretty immune to prickly wool, and full-grown alpaca can have a lot of guard hairs that might irritate your skin. I mean, you can see the pokey wire hairs in the picture. NOT SOFT. It's a pretty raspberry color though, and the bulky yarn at the tight gauge gives it enough structure so that it's not floppy.

FO: Drop-stitch Long Cowls

Oooh, wow. I just realized I made these way back in August. Gah. Well, here they are, about to be sent out to their intended recipients.

I've been seeing a lot of hugely long cowls on the street this year. Mostly on women, but I've seen some being worn by stylish men as well. They are either worn long as one continuous scarf or doubled to make a warmer thick cowl. These were originally intended to be regular scarves, but seeing that big cowls are ruling the fashion scene, some quick witchcraft with needle and thread transformed them into just that.





I went to work on one, and then made another, just for fun and to use up some stash. They are both stockinette stitch scarves. Right before I bound off, I dropped every 4th stitch and helped it run almost all the way down to the last row. Then I bound off, seamed it up and steamed blocked it to open up the lace.

The yarn is Ella Rae Classic- a simple worsted-weight wool similar to Cascade 220. To do a drop-stitch scarf like this, you really need to use 100% wool- something with a little tooth to it. Otherwise, the drop columns will expand and you'll lose the look. It gives it a more interesting, lacy look than just plain stockinette.

I used size 8 needles and knit until I was sick of it. I was thinking of maybe tie-dying them, or maybe hand painting them, but in the end I just let them be.

Don't forget- I'm having 30% off EVERYTHING in my Etsy store until the end of the month. Use code "Trente" at checkout. I've just ordered some gorgeous polworth silk blend roving that will be dyed up and listed as soon as there's a bit more room on my yarn shelf and a few other goodies as well. Check it out!