cowl crazy

I got an interesting knitting book from Book City a while ago called The Shape of Knitting. At the time I thought, okay, this could be good for stash-busting, and then I put it on my shelf and sort of forgot about it.

Something clicked a couple of weeks ago, and it came down from the shelf. This time I pulled several different balls of orphaned chunky-weight skeins of yarn from my stash and tried out this cowl pattern.

Here's the cowl laid flat and without its buttons sewn on yet, making a lovely scimitar shape:

If you know anything about knit or crochet, but don't know the pattern or book themselves, you might still make an educated guess as to its construction. Start one of the buttonhole tabs, join new yarn for a few rows to make the vertical buttonhole, then merge the halves. Make a second buttonhole tab the same way, then knit across the two. Make the cable twist, which is several rows high and overlays the other half of the cowl, so... oops, must need to start and stop the yarn a few times in there too, right?

Nope. The entire thing, dear reader, is made in one continuous piece. There is one tail from the initial cast-on, and one from the final cast-off, and that is it. Sew on the buttons (which go in nice logical places, so are not hard to locate), and you are done.

Plus 85% of it is done on 9mm needles. Each one takes maybe three and a half hours to make, especially once you get comfortable with the tabs/cable part. Is it any surprise I made four of the things?

The two shown above went to my chiropractor and her office manager as Yule gifts. The one below (and another one I didn't photograph) got donated to charity. Mostly I had to make myself stop because the button costs were starting to add up.

But if you can lay your hands on the book and have about 120m of chunky-weight yarn handy, I strongly recommend this pattern. It's quick, it's unorthodox, it's fashionable, and it's fun.

surprise purple projects

My sister-in-law asked if I could knit the nieces some cowls. The brief was: make two the same so she wouldn't have to worry about which one went onto which girl, make them purple to match their winter coats, and make them snug-ish — the whole point was to replace dangly scarves and avoid a scarf's tendency to get caught on things, require tying/arranging to wear, or slip off and get lost.

I did some Googling around, and found this free pattern which comes in both children's and women's sizes. 9mm needles, bulky yarn, 18 stitches, and 72 rows. Graft the ends together and you're done. Both the cowls took about four episodes of Welcome to Night Vale plus a couple episodes of The Musketeers.

I got two skeins of yarn (acrylic — the nieces aren't ready for wool yet) for the cowls, and they took up just over half a skein of yarn each. That left me with stash, and I really want not to accumulate any more stash. I need slippers, and I had already found this free pattern for slippers that look like Ugg boots. Although sometimes I feel like the only woman in the Western world who doesn't like Uggs, I figured they would make good slippers.

I went back to the yarn shop and picked up two more skeins of yarn. There was enough left over from the cowls to make four sole pieces (I wanted a double sole), and the two new skeins of yarn made the uppers. I was done the slippers in time to wear them for the dinner party I had that night.

There were absolutely no mods to the cowl pattern, and the only thing I changed for the slippers (besides adding an extra sole layer) was that I used foundation single crochet to start each piece, used a standing stitch to start the leg parts of the uppers, and spiralled my way up the leg instead of formally slip-stitching and chain-one-ing at the end of each round. Instead, I just slip-stitched at the top of the boot leg and finished off.

Oh, and I slip-stitched the upper and sole layers together instead of using single crochet (!) like the pattern called for.

After all that, I have virtually no stash — just some odds and ends I'll use for provisional cast on sections on a project I already have in-flight. I'll have to blog about that one shortly.

Meanwhile, this is how the boot slipper soles look after just being worn for a few hours:

Now you can see why I wanted to make double soles. It should last me the winter, anyhow, and the yarn was on sale for Boxing Day, so there's that. They'll be fine. While acrylic is not as warm as other options and will need to be washed more frequently than, say, wool, my apartment tends to be warm anyhow, so I only need light foot insulation, and acrylic is easy to wash.