Get ready for St. Patrick’s Day with a stranded-colorwork cowl that includes some shamrocks, hearts, kisses and hugs. There’s even a lucky clover in there. For most of the rows, you will need to know how to use two colors in a stranded (“Fair Isle”) method to create motifs. The ribbing is standard knit (K) and purl (P). Through the short stockinet portions, you can carry the unused color up the inner side, catching it here and there to avoid large loops. For the stripes, consider using a ‘jogless’ technique when changing color.

For the large-size cowl, you will need 135 yards in green and 160 yards in a high-contrast background color. A lightly speckled background would also work well as long as the shamrock color “pops” out from it.

For a wider cowl, you can insert additional rows of plain stockinet or stripes between the motifs. For a narrower cowl - or a headband - reduce the ribbing, omit the stripes, and/or omit one or both colorwork motif bands bordering the shamrocks.

This cowl has yet to be test knitted outside of my sample in size Large.