It’s also going to be linked from the photo; I am going to salt this link everywhere. I really like how the cowl turned out.
First off, it’s fitted. It flares at the lower hem, narrows at the neck, and flares very slightly at the top again. You can pull this up over your face if you’re very cold, and it fits great. I also like the lack of ease because I think it makes small accessories warmer; a loose cowl doesn’t seem as insulating unless it’s one of a few layers.
It’s a good showcase for scraps or that last little bit of fancy yarn (Hedgehog Fibres Sock in this case); the MC is a pretty economical choice (Cascade Heritage Sock).
I usually work up samples while I’m writing, but in this case, the final sample was knit pretty hastily after the pattern was mostly finalized. So it’s pretty satisfying to have it come out well!
Current work is actually really exciting, but it’s taking forever (larger knits! garments instead of accessories! spring layers! possible summer tops and all-season knits!), so it’s also a little angst-inducing and I don’t have a lot to immediately show.
HOWEVER, I do also have a pretty good cowl ready to see:
I thought this might be too simple in the sportweight yarn (I’ve got a laceweight version with a little more complexity for later this fall), but the shape is extremely satisfying and works very well as a cowl. It takes about 250 yards of yarn, which seems like a little bit of a high measurement (it’s been pretty rainy; the wool might be holding on to some moisture, enough to weigh a little more on the scale than it should), but it’s easily a weekend project for a seasoned knitter. It took me about four to six hours, possibly a little more—I was trying to track time closely in roughly 50-minute chunks, but often kept knitting past when I planned to take breaks.
I also want to knit another one right away, which I feel is a good endorsement—I get knitting boredom really quickly these days, and don’t often want to knit two of anything. Bodes well for the socks I have case on, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this project if it’s the type of design you like and you get a chance to work it up! It’s a nice small knit in between bigger designs, and has almost a refreshing feel.
I have not kept up on posting new designs! We’ve got a couple of new spring shawls to knit: Isometric Screenshot, above, which uses partial skeins and an interesting shifting midpoint, and Little Green, immediately below, which is designed to be a similarly interesting technical project you can knit up in a single skein (though it may not look its absolute best in a heavily variegated colorway, in retrospect).
My personal favorite is probably the more traditional shawl, though the button-up shawlette is kind of a neat approach to the limitations of working within a specific yardage.
We have a new shawl pattern up! This is a pretty solid textured triangle, with enough interesting features to make an engaging project, even though there’s nothing especially technically difficult.
I find this strangely satisfying, even though the basic idea had me stuck for a while—I wanted to use shapes that don’t tesselate as well (and I still might for a future design! Stay tuned!) and I wanted to avoid finishing seams, but ultimately my (attempted and discarded) solutions for that felt a lot more fiddly and potentially frustrating than the technique I ended up with. The handspun yarn really lends itself well to this. I’d like to be able to use superwash commercial yarn here, but I think it might not hold up as well; it’s best to use soft wool with a little bit of natural texture.
(Nothing came up when I searched for a knit design called Blocky. So I published Blocky. When I went to add my own projects to Blocky, there was another Blocky, but it was very different to mine.)
Here is mine:
You can knit this project at least two ways: as a shawl, or as a cowl. Finishing for either one is pretty easy, and although I went with the cowl option, I felt that wet blocking took away a lot of the bouncy wool-yarn vitality of the thing, if that’s not too strange a thing to say. Garter stitch grows, but it also felt like it went kind of flat on me and I preferred the unblocked version pretty strongly.
For my second project, I’m doing the shawl (or trying to get close; I am having to kind of play fast and loose with yarn requirements and will probably end up with something a little different to what I had in mind color-wise) in a two-ply non-superwash wool, in hopes it kind of keeps more of the loft and bounce. The yarn I used in the cowl sample is one of my all-time favorites (Malabrigo Sock), but it’s just not quite as satisfying here as it is usually.
The photo above doesn’t show much—just yarn—but it’s probably the best yarn photo I’ve taken all year. There’s about five minutes of really nice light in this little alcove in the afternoon in January, apparently.
Anyway, there’s also Revenge of Pup Patch Hat and Cowl in this series. Please check them out if you’re interested or like mitered squares (these aren’t mitered squares, but they’re kind of mitered-square adjacent in some ways).
I have a Twitter account, but have never really felt comfortable there. (My niche isn’t one of the functional ones, so I got put off a bit by the rage-cycle-for-engagement technique I was seeing and that influenced my whole perception of the thing.) In the Year of our Lord 2022, Twitter is imploding somewhat, and this has a pretty dramatically different impact on your life depending on whether you were using it to organize a revolution or were avoiding it because you didn’t want to see manufactured drama about lace knitting (literally; this is an absolutely real example), and it is a little stunning to observe, but I do not have a lot of personal insight or pithy observation, although I am going to miss seeing that guy who does the really high-end animations of velociraptors squaring off while wielding anime weapons.
KNITTING:
I’m wrapping up a cowl and a shawl design, but nothing is going to be up soon. (One’s been four years in the making; the other is on a more normal time scale, but it still doesn’t feel fast.)
I cannot actually find the original files for the current cowl’s schematic, so I can’t edit them and bring them up into line with my current style. If I could erase the handwritten text just by pulling off a layer or two, it would be so easy and simple to relabel the elements—but that’s not how it’s going to be, I guess. (UPDATE: I found them! Or rather, I figured it out, but the app is discontinued and I am a little disenchanted with the app creator, so I am not going to download the suggested new thing that would recover the files. Unless making a new schematic turns out to be really hard, I guess. Or inconvenient, or tedious.)
Shawl is done! It’s a bit of a mini-shawl situation, though. (I ran out of yarn. It takes about 550 yds.) I’ve been really enjoying the textures on it, but I’ve been feeling torn between sticking to my budget/yarn requirements (you’re throwing a substantial amount of your time and at least some of your entertainment budget into this. Do you want to knit a $40 shawl or a $60 shawl?) and just throwing all my ideas into this one. I think I want to work out a way to do both, but I want to make sure it’s fair to everyone; right now, the best way seems to be to go forward with the pattern as is (I have put it on the dress form, pre-blocking, and it’s a really nice-looking shawl), and then add a Surprise Update later if I can pull it off—but without promising anything, or even talking about it after this.
I HAVE TO KNIT A MONSTER by request. The monster keychains were really popular, but they weren’t super effective as tissue holders, at least not for the style of tissue and the way it’s packaged in my country. I’m planning to switch them into being a handkerchief pocket, which is ridiculous, a little,* but will make me feel better about the lacking function of these things as tissue holders. Anyway, I’m trying to make that a) request-fulfilling, and b) useful for me to do, in that I can write down clear instructions and have a pattern to offer up.
*Or is it???? Because I definitely own at least a lens-cloth that has a pretty similar keychain/pocket structure. So if you sewed the handkerchief into the monster, a little kid could use it and not lose the handkerchief, and wouldn’t necessarily be cramming a damp handkerchief back into the keychain after drying hands, etc.
A DELAY:
The upcoming cowl pattern is now finished, but I’m going to have to push back publication so I can offer decent yardage estimates (cowl was finished, partially unraveled, and has now been reknit—but it’s still damp and weighs 3.5 oz. I am pretty sure a bit of that is water-weight, literally, and I’d also like to have a better grasp of the colorwork yardage, since it would be pretty cool if you could use this design with one of the manufacturer’s pre-chosen colorwork kits. (Which you could anyway, but it would be neat if you didn’t have to adjust anything, and if I knew that to be true.) That’s going to be a little rough, since I used up the rest of those skeins (again literally!) years ago, so I’m probably going to have to knit a pointless partial repeat of this—one I know I won’t finish! I do not have enough yarn!—just so I can unravel it and weigh things).
On the up side, it is all done, apart from that (and a spacing issue on some text on the schematic), so I may finally be catching up on November, just in time for the week when no one in the US will be on Ravelry. I am so great at timing.
You can currently buy any 3 mouse army patterns and get the fourth one free! It is easy to do! You only have to be sure you have all 4 patterns in your cart at checkout to take advantage of this offer.
This is the autumn mood photo of Auks cowl. Auks cowl is reversible!
(Just between you and me, on this very private forum, I spent a small part of the morning putting together a yarn order wishlist, and this is directly related to that. My social media presence is pretty small, so I strongly doubt that this little weekend sale will fund the whole planned yarn purchase, but it’d be nice to offset it a little.
This is actually going to be the first yarn purchase I’ve made this year—right now, I’m still working through yarns from 2021—so the ideal Wishlist Palette feels and looks overwhelming. It’s hard to keep in mind that it’s almost a year’s worth of yarn purchasing (and would technically be less than the cumulative 2021, even if I were to make the whole purchase at once), and that it covers at least 6 formal project samples, plus whatever the scraps compel me to do.
Anyway! The concise version is that right now, most of your pattern purchase from now through this weekend goes straight into supporting the next ~6 patterns (or technically, the next ~6 patterns after the next ~3-4, since I try to work a little ahead), and you get a free pattern when you purchase 3. So if you’ve been thinking about putting together a mini-collection of mouse army patterns, this is a pretty good time to do it.)
Until next time, in about 8 weeks probably. Here’s the official “look, it’s reversible!” photo for the Auks Cowl.
The title is misleading clickbait. There are no dinosaur bones in this post. I am not really even sure why past-me thought that was a useful heading. Was it going to be about dinosaur bones? I cannot remember.
I haven’t actually posted about any of the recent design projects! I haven’t posted for July!
The main Summer Kitchen (well, loosely: Summer Kitchen has become home decor/organization/housewares in general, and wool boxes are maybe not kitchen-related specifically) project is Little Boxes. (The one above is shown pre-felting. It gets its shape from the yarn it’s holding, but after felting, this particular sample didn’t get as small as the others I’ve done in the same yarn—one even from the same skein. I probably need to up the agitation.) There are some others in the works, but it’s probably going to feel too early to talk about them up until the last minute.
Isurus is the latest shawl. I haven’t been this excited about a shawl in a while, but this was pretty rewarding to design & knit, and finally got me using the fancy Hedgehog Fibres yarn I’ve been holding on to for two years. Two years!
That’s probably going to be it for July, since it’s the 30th now and all. Cheers!
I think my actual goal for the Son of Dog Days project is to create designs that work as little summery kerchief projects—but are also easily expandable, so that you could knit a full-size shawl from the same set of instructions.
SON OF DOG DAYS I: Souvenir
This is a small, textured kerchief; the repeat is standard, so you can easily turn this project into a full-size shawl if you like.
SON OF DOG DAYS II: Oneiros
Working a bias-knit triangle with some tweaks results in a kerchief with a lot more volume, and the combination of garter stitch and stockinette is a nice effect. This one’s also designed with easy customization in mind—there’s extra text explaining how the repeats differ, so that once you know the strategy, you can add as many repeats as you like.
SON OF DOG DAYS III: ???
SON OF DOG DAYS III is closely related to II, with the same basic concept and bias-knit structure. I both wanted to see what this looked like in a garter stitch version, and wanted something extra so I could have a little more promotional flexibility with it. This one follows the same rule of flexibility (add repeats if you feel like a whole shawl project, or knit the small size shown) as the prior two—
but it also struck me that if you attached ties to the sides, you could make an impromptu asymmetric haltertop sort of thing. The ties are a mod—and i-cord might work better—but the size of the kerchief is from the pattern as written, and it’s on a 34” bust dress form. If I were to formally write up a halter pattern, I have a few ideas for addressing that neckline—but for now, I’m trying to resist the temptation to get distracted from all the other things I have on my plate.
Anyway, that pretty much brings the blog up to date with the knitting pattern project for now! I missed updating in late May, but this gathers up most of the things outside the Summer Kitchen 2022 set. (It’s a set of one thing right now.)
The Mouse Army Knitting Co. 