After I completed Thea’s pink cardigan there was quite a bit of yarn left. She decided she would like a cowl made from the remaining yarn and chose this one.

Used a long tail cast on because it is very elastic, will be easy to graft the other end onto, and won’t leave a big ridge. I didn’t use a JMCO b/c I thought that it might result in too much of a break in the lace pattern.

The designer has CDDs (centred double decreases) marked as “sl2, k1, p2sso”. I didn’t realise this in the first go through the pattern and just worked the sts as written. It shows, but probably won’t be noticed unless someone goes looking. In case someone is reading this who doesn’t know what a CDD is (or in case I forget), you slip 2 sts together knitwise (that is to say, put the right needle through the second stitch on the left needle as if to knit it and keep pushing it through so that it also goes through the first stitch on the left needle, pulling both of those sts off the left needle and onto the right), then you knit the next stitch as per usual, then slip both of the slipped stitches back over the stitch just knitted and off the needle.

I am going to make the cowl longer than once through the pattern would create. The designer suggests that if you want to do this you should do rows 1 through 87 twice b/f moving on to row 88 to the end. Seeing as this would result in having two ws rows next to each other, I am thinking that maybe you should either rpt after finishing row 86, or do row 87 and start again at row 2 rather than row 1. (NB: rows 1 and 87 are the exactly the same - as are all ws rows - except that row 1 has the notes for the placement of the side markers, which obviously isn’t needed more than once for the garment.)

Every 20th row begins with a knit stitch rather than a slipped stitch. At first, I thought it was a mistake in the pattern, but then I realised that it occurs regularly and probably is used as a means of counting rows/patterns as you look at your work. I didn’t do it - but I started using a st marker to mark those rows.

This knits up extremely quickly and would likely be a great first lace pattern for a beginner wanting to try lace. I don’t have much experience in knitting lace, but I’m not a beginner at knitting in general …

NB: with the exception of the first and last rows, all ws rows are the same.

To close the loop I used Kitchener stitch.

The other thing that I discovered (or, at least, confirmed) during the knitting of this cowl, is that the best method for me to perform a ssk is to slip the first st knitwise (as per usual ssk) and then the second stitch as though you were going to do a ptbl, then knit the stitches together tbl as per usual. This seems to result in the right hand stitch being pulled over on top of the other in a manner that more closely mirrors a nice, tidy k2tog (only slanted in the opposite direction). If I do ssk as per the usual instructions (ie, slipping the two stitches separately knitwise then knitting them tog tbl), it tends to look a bit untidy and really doesn’t sit very nicely compared to my k2tog sts. This is a bit aggravating when you are trying to do mirrored decs.

Blocked reasonably hard to 49cm along one edge (ie, ~98cm for the entire loop) x 27cm tall whilst on the blocking mat. The lace opens up beautifully and I’m even happier with how I am now doing ssk .