The cowl is made with fishtail lace pattern with optional bobble edges. About 200-220 yard of worsted weight or DK weight yarn will do. The maroon color one is made of Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Worsted (cast on 80 Sts.). The variegated one is made of Noro Chirimen, a DK weight yarn (cast on 90 Sts.) To customize the size, change the number of cast on to any multiples of 10 sts. Finer yarn or larger needle can be used for lacier and lighter cowl but the bobbles might not look as good. To omit the bobble, knit the stitch instead of MB (making bobble).

All the stitch patterns come from the Mon Tricot Knitting Dictionary Stitches Patterns (fishtail stitch II on page 37 and bobble stitch on page 13).

I named the pattern after the pets we used to have. Before my husband and I got married, we used to go to pet stores to look at fishes and other animals. One day, he told me that his father had an old fish tank in their basement that hadn’t been maintained for a long time. Surprisingly, one platy fish was still alive. So I bought a 1.5 gal tank from the store and he gave me the fish to keep. Foolishly, I also bought a small pleco, an algae eater fish, not knowing that the pleco would eventually outgrew the tank! Soon, I got a 10 gal tank and then a second 10 gal. My husband eventually cleaned up the old tank (35 gal) in the old basement and started keeping fishes in his room too. When he got a 50 gal tank, he gave me the 35 gal. So at one time I had 3 tanks in my one room apartment. Not only did we have all kinds of tropical fishes, we also planted the tanks with all kinds of aquatic plants. When we moved in together and eventually got married, we stopped buying new fishes, but we still kept the 50 gal and 35 gal tanks to take care of remaining aging fishes, including the original pleco, which was >10” long and more than 10 years old by then. We also had some 2nd or 3rd generation of guppies from my original purchases 10 years ago. In November 2015, I was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. Just before my surgery, we gave all our fishes and plants to the fish store and therefore ended our decade long hobby.