Finished: Spiral Rib Cowl

When your friend who is going through her second bout with breast cancer hands you yarn and asks you to make her something. You make it. When the yarn is the wrong weight for what she wanted, you make her something beautiful instead.

One night T handed me a skein of this gorgeous yarn. It was a gray wool and yak yarn from Plymouth Yarn. What she wanted was a pair of Naburn Mitts like I had made myself a couple years back. Unfortunately the yarn she gave me was sport weight and the mitt pattern calls for worsted. I’m rarely able to successfully do the math required to change a pattern with different yarn weight requirement.

Instead of just giving her the yarn back, I decided to make her something instead.

The pattern

It took a bit to find the right pattern for this yarn. I had one skein (348 yards/100 grams) and I wanted something that wasn’t too complicated (so it didn’t take forever and I could work on it on the go) but not too basic.

This is one of my favorite uses of Ravelry. Their advance search is really good for either searching projects people used a particular yarn for (what I did here) or searching a pattern type (e.g. “shawl”) and then selecting the options that fit the yarn I have.

Doing that, I found the creatively named F957 Spiral Rib Cowl pattern from Plymouth Yarns. This is a really simple pattern with a faux cable. It’s a four row pattern repeat that’s easy to remember. The hardest part of this project is just keeping track of what row I’m on, and I have an app on my watch to help me with that.

Aside from adding more repeats to make the cowl wider, I also added a single knit row after the cast on row and before the bind off row. I saw it in one of the other project notes and I always like that foundation.

The yarn

Holy cow. I didn’t know Plymouth Yarn made such a beautiful yarn. Yakima is 85% Marino wool and 15% Yak. This yarn is just SO SOFT. And the color is really beautiful with slight variations in the shades of gray.

This is a really lofty yarn. It split easily and formed yarn donuts as I worked the project (you know, those little rings of yarn that form along the strand as you knit). Because of those yarn donuts, I did warn my friend that it might pill as she wears it.

But the final project is gorgeous.

The details

I knit this on US4 needles instead of the US5 the pattern calls for. Normally I knit tight and go up a needle size, but this one felt too loose on a 5. It turned out just perfect on a 4. That did require adding more repeats as I wanted the cowl to have a drape to it, not be tight against her neck.

I use the Twisted German Cast On for pretty much everything I knit. Along with being a pretty cast on, it’s a stretchy cast on.

And I cast off using a bind off with the fancy name of K1, K2tog-tbl. This is really stretchy and pretty. This is the only bind off I use for socks or anything that needs to have any stretch. It takes up more yarn, but I like it.

Both of these do tend to cause a little more ripple in the cast on and off ends, but again, I like how it looks (though even looking at the projects on Rav, this cowl does generally ripple and curl a little on both ends).

And of course, you must block. I stretched this a little, but not nearly as aggressively as I do with lace items. I mean, look at the before and after!

I love how this turned out and I think my friend did as well.