Well, Maybe a day too late?
We have had some proper winter weather this week – several inches of snow built up over several days of regular snowfall and unusually cold temps for this part of the world. Depending on your preference, our lows at night are in the teens (F) or well below 0 (C). Over the past several days it never even got near rising above freezing.
So, as you can imagine, a nice warm neck-hugging cowl is just the thing to have. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite manage to finish it in time for our walk downtown in the snow on Sunday. But I’d like to think that walk made the promise of a warm cowl to come that much more exciting. I did finish it Sunday night though!
Sunday (aside from our walk) was largely spent on the finishing steps of the cowl. First up was attaching the lining to the outside where the rib joins the body. This involves knitting each live stitch on the left needle with the corresponding stitch on the wrong side of the lace outside. The instructions suggest picking up each stitch one at a time with the right needle as you’re ready to knit it together with the live stitch. I find this tedious, and makes it hard to track the line of stitches I’m knitting to. It’s also hard on my hands.
So instead, I take a smaller DPN and pick up a nice string of stitches and knit from here, more like one would in a 3-needle bind off. I always leave 2 stitches on the needle to help me keep to the same row of stitches when it’s time to pick up more. This way I have a mini-rhythm of picking up stitches alternated with a mini-rhythm of knitting.
Because the lining and the outside are matched together with the knit directions going opposite ways, I also found it easier to rotate the work around when picking up my stitches to match the direction in which they were originally knit. This was particularly helpful with this pattern, as the row of knit stitches I was picking up from was followed by a row which included k2tog and yo – which means that tracking where the stitches I was picking up was a bit trickier. If I did the pattern again, I would do an extra row of knit before going into the lace pattern to make this easier.
Finally, I had to unpick my provisional cast on, moving the stitches to a second needle, and graft (kitchener) it to live lining stitches. This folded over the corrugated rib edge and provided a tidy fully lined cowl. It also took ages to do. I’m perfectly comfortable grafting, and basically have the process memorized. But it’s still not speedy. I also discovered that my right index finger (the one I sliced badly as we exited 2020) did not appreciate handling a needle against the finger pad for extended periods. Thus, I had to do it in stages, with a bit of time in between.
Final insult: the pattern says to cut a tale 60in long to graft the stitches. I cut a good 80inches. And came up about 4in short… so I had to spit slice a final length of yarn on to finish it out. I’ll admit though – I’m finicky about making sure the stitches I create in the graft are sized very very closely to the stitches I knit. So this may both have taken more yarn than the designer used and does slow down the process a bit. But I’d challenge somebody to tell at a glance which row is the row of grafted stitches!
Because of the cold weather, I didn’t dally when it came to blocking – it immediately went in for a soak. I laid it flat overnight on my ironing board. I wanted to get it mostly dried flat to ensure that the lace outside didn’t stretch out too much, and I was careful to ensure the lining was smoothed out on the inside. The next morning, I put it over the radiator to remove the last of the dampness. By the afternoon, it was snug around TheEnabler’s neck.
