These 4 cosy cowls are wonderful first Fair Isle projects - they are small, quick to knit, and perfect warm accessories.

The cowls are knitted in the round on a 16-inch circular and use no more than two colours per round.
Choose between DK weight with a 4.0 mm needle, and worsted weight with a 4.5 mm needle, or whichever needle helps you get the correct gauge.
Two colours of yarn are needed (100 grams of each will be plenty). Try taking a black and white photo of them to see if their colour value is different enough for the pattern to show clearly.

Increasing to a larger size is easy to do - how to adjust the stitch count is explained with lots of examples.

Feel free to mix and match the edgings: a braided edge, a rolled purl edge and a corrugated rib are all included.

This pattern explains many details that I teach in my Fair Isle classes: trapping floats, avoiding purl colour blips, the simplest chart reading, straightening out pattern jogs (when you have yarn tails to work with), and yarn dominance.

I hope you enjoy working with these designs!