04-28-2016

Super excited to test knit this cowl for one of my favorite designers! My yarn has been chosen - a beautiful dark purple color which is so squishy soft in the ball. It is worsted weight and is composed of seven very small plies of yarn. Currently swatching - unless this yarn changes drastically during blocking, I’ll probably be using a bigger needle size than some. I do tend to knit on the tight side…

04-29-2016

Swatching is done. I swatched flat because my flat and in-the-round gauge is usually pretty nearly identical, and any miniscule difference won’t matter in this case. A US9 gives me 4 spi in st st. I also swatched a US8 (4.25 spi) and a US 7 (definitely not drapey enough), as the 7 was the size recommended on the ball band (they suggest 4.5 spi at that needle size, but I got a higher stitch count with too dense of fabric). Measurements were made after blocking. Yarn blocks beautifully! The stockinette roll blocked right out even without pinning.

04-30-2016

I’m about a third of the way done, maybe a bit more. Knitting is going smoothly, no issues with the pattern.

05-03-2016

Knitting is done, time to block and weave in ends. I used less yarn than anticipated, and the size seems a bit smaller than I thought it might be. No tape measure by me at the moment, but I’m curious to see how much this grows when it’s blocked. In its current unblocked state it is super squishy and soft, and does fit me even as is, so I know it will be a wearable FO.

I made this cowl using a 20” circular needle. It worked great until I got to the last two decrease repeats, then things got a bit too tight. I didn’t have a shorter needle handy at the moment I was knitting, or I would have transferred the knitting to the next smaller size. I was able to make it work using traveling loop.

05-06-2016

Finally had time to weave in the ends and work on blocking my cowl. Here are the measurements, unblocked, and unstretched:

18” circumference at narrowest point,
24” circumference at widest point, and
7” tall.

I actually don’t own any blocking wires, and my blocking mats are packed up in a moving box inaccessible at the moment, so I’m first going to just do the pat-and-stretch method and see how well this will block. If I still want a more aggressive block, I just might use this as an excuse to finally spring for some blocking wires!

05-10-2016

I wet blocked my cowl. Since I don’t have blocking wires at the moment, I just stretched the fabric a bit and laid it out how I like it to look, patting the fabric flat. The stockinette roll blocked right out (100% merino will sometimes do that) and it looks great.

Here are blocked measurements:
18.5” circumference at narrowest point,
27.5” circumference at widest point, and
6.25” tall.

Pulling the cowl into a longer loop definitely took away some of the cowl’s height. I hope to try Hunter’s cowl blocking method as described in the pattern some day to see if I can get both height and width out of this yarn.

Also, in anticipation of some day blocking this with wires using Hunter’s method, I did JSSBO for the bind-off. It does flare out a bit presently since the bind-off really wasn’t stretched in blocking. But I suspect that will tidy up nicely in future blocking attempts.

Feedback on Yarn:
Lovely yarn! It took to blocking very nicely. I’d definitely use this yarn again for anything to be worn next to the skin. It was a pleasure to work with and felt great in my hands.

This yarn specially says “hand wash only,” but as an experiment, I machine washed my swatch in my front-loader on the hand-wash/wool cycle. YMMV, but with my ultra-delicate cycle, machine washing didn’t significantly harm the swatch. However, I’d probably just hand wash/soak the FO because the stockinette roll blocked out better after a long soak than it did after machine washing. But it is nice to know that if this cowl really gets dirty, it can be machine washed if necessary.

I didn’t try machine drying my swatch as most likely that’d result in felting - this isn’t superwash wool.