Lost in Cowl Land

I don't know how everyone else is doing with the Great Cowl KAL, mostly because I'm hiding from the Ravelry group in shame, but the latest pattern has become a slog for me.  I spend hours and hours on it and I'm still struggling.

If you're knitting the pattern you can probably tell from the photo that I have started the short-rows early.  This is a great pattern to use up all of a ball of yarn because she has you cast on a giant number of stitches and then knit in the round until you are a certain percentage through your yardage.  And since I am knitting this out of the only skein of Kitchen Sink Dyeworks I will ever own I would really like to use it all.  But I just can't.  I know it will result in a beautiful item, but I can not stand to knit a single round more of stockinette on this cowl.  If I did not have a deadline I could work on something else at the same time to break up the monotony, but I will let nothing stop me from finishing this cowl.

At the same time I think the item in my mind has become a little different from the original pattern.  It snowed two days ago and now it is back in the 70s reminding me that yes I do live in the south and it would be really nice to knit something I could wear more than a few days out of the year.  So I'm starting to envision something thinner and drapier.  The yarn is a merino bamboo blend so I think it will work as a more spring-y item.

Then again it could be that I just really want to play with my new toys.  It was Chris' and my anniversary yesterday so he bought me the one gift I'd been hinting at for months -- Knit Picks Interchangeables.  I'll do a more comprehensive review once I get to play with them more.  I'm so excited!

But first, cowl.

Hey look! It's Wednesday!

Community Yarn

One of my favorite things of all time is getting mail.  I am a child of the internet and love my email, texting, etc, but there is something so fun about opening the mail box to see what's inside.  The added challenge of living in an apartment complex is getting to the mail before the office closes so that if you get a package you can pick it up and not have to wait an entire weekend to get whatever goodies were in your box.  This is the problem I had on Saturday which is why it took until today for me to get a sizable lightweight box sent to me by my good friend Erica.

Yarn!  Erica and I are both participating in designer Liz Abinante's Great Cowl KAL and I had whined to her that I was going to have to buy yarn for one of the patterns because I did not have any bulky in my stash.  Turns out that she had a stash of Rowan Biggy Print an a truly obnoxious shade of pink that she had bought on a destash and was more than willing to share.  So it looks like we may be knitting matching cowls in a few weeks.

The Cowl KAL, by the way, has been going great.  I finished the first pattern in just a few days, but have not taken any FO pictures because the buttons I ordered have not yet arrived.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go through my "normal" buttons and find some for the finishing so that I qualify for the next pattern.  Then I'll just take those off and attach the nice ones when they arrive.  In the meantime it has been great fun to see everyone's finished cowls up on the group thread.  It was amazing how fast it took off when people started catching wind of what was going on.  And it has been like being a part of a knitting community more than anything I have done lately.  I'm pretty alone in my crafting here.  I have yet to make friends outside of work and even though I live only a few minutes from an LYS they are truly never open and so I have yet to find any sort of knit night that fits my erratic schedule.  The great thing about the Cowl KAL is that it has been filling that need for me.  In addition to the group enthusiasm, Erica and I had a skype date when the first pattern came out and I'm hoping we will try this again for the next.  Even Liz has been getting into the fun of it.  She has been lovely on the boards helping people out and was so sweet as to tweet responses when I had questions or wanted to share my excitement.  Maybe I'll look into getting more people involved in a group chat about the patterns, there is a chat feature on Ravelry.  In the meantime, I'll be tweeting away my progress with the hashtag #cowlkal and there's still plenty of time if you'd like to join in on the fun!