A couple of years ago, I took a colorwork knitting class with Canadian designer Sylvia Olsen, author of Knitting Stories: Personal Essays and Seven Coast Salish-inspired Knitting Patterns and Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater. In the class, I learned that the style of knitting used to make Cowichan sweaters – including the colorwork technique that has no floats – is the only 100% North American knitting tradition. I designed this cowl because I had so much fun in the class, I wanted to keep knitting with the two-color technique that we learned.

This project can be made using traditional colorwork technique used by the Coast Salish knitters or with any technique for stranded knitting that you already know. I’ve used two different techniques on the cowl to make it a mini class:

• The Coast Salish stretchy colorwork technique tends to work up looser than traditional stranded knitting for many knitters, so you may find that you need to use a smaller needle for this technique. It’s quite surprising, because the opposite is normally true for stranded knitting.
• Many knitters need to go up a needle size to get the same gauge in the Two-handed Fair Isle colorwork technique than they do in one-color stockinette stitch.

Links to video tutorials for both techniques are included.