The cowl is fnished

I am pleased to announce that I managed to finish off the cowl this last week. I have to admit that I haven’t finished the ends and I haven’t ironed it but I wanted to show it to you today.

Just a bit better ironed. But really pleased with it!

I have learned a lot!

When I continued the cowl after last week’s post, I did allow myself to not catch the yarn even when doing three stitches as  a way to speed up the knitting.

However when I got to about half way, I started to read advice on how to knit these two colour patterns and found that there were a lot of differences which was confusing but, reading what it said in the needlework encyclopedia I inherited for my mother, I did manage to start knitting with one lot of yarn held in the right hand and the other in the left, whereby the yarn on the right is thrown and the yarn on the left is picked up. It was more of a strain on my wrist but I even managed to work out how to catch the yarn for longer runs without leaving the yarn twisted. Here is the back. I find that there is more than half the wool left and so making a hat to match might be in order but this leaves me with a dilemma.

Next time I would like to try knitting more traditional fair isle patterns but they normally have reflective symmetry horizontally or vertically or both whereas the patterns in the cowl mostly have rotational symmetry so a hat done like that might look non-matching even if the colours were the same.

However I am going to have a break from knitting now and so plenty of time to think about it.