Fall Twist Cowl

Walking through the stacks at Romni Wools, I came across two large boxes filled with Estelle’s Cloud Cotton.  Salivating over the richly colored organic yarn, I picked through the lot thinking of all the fall and winter cowls I could design.  My hands picked up orange, red, and brown.  Just then a pattern popped into my mind and into the bin the 3 skeins went!

"Fall Twist Cowl" accented with a recycled clay button from Nature Buttons

Flash forward several months and I’m once again digging through a box of yarn, but this time it is my stash.  As I picked up the orange, at first I thought why did I buy orange?  Besides it being my eldest nephew’s favorite color, the thought of knitting in orange was as unfamiliar as String Theory. 

Nathaniel climbing a rock wall, rockin' the orange T

Challenging myself, I washed the orange, red, and brown and started thinking of designs.  I was dreaming of Fall and the changing weather, the beauty that surrounds each day in the mountains.  Crisp, cold mornings and evenings accented with color on every tree.  How the seasons change reminded me of twists.  The trees inspired the cables.

Standing on a rock in the garden with my loved Great Dane, Cheeky by my side
(yes, I knit that sweater - a modified Berroco pattern from long ago)

So the pattern was born.  But the construction was completely foreign.  I tried several attempts to achieve the cabled braided cowl, but kept running into the same difficulty – I lost too much length when I tried to braid during construction.  I thought about doing short rows, but gawked at the time it would take.  Instead I worked each section individually. However, this lead to the dreaded pattern testing.

Knitting and weighing

Weighing and knitting

I ended up knitting the pattern 3 times before coming to a consensus on the proper length of each section.  One more time to check the lengths and I was done.  The yarn provided enough length to knit two “Fall Twist Cowls” – as long as I swapped out the main color for a secondary color – and a close to the neck cowl based on the Fibonacci Sequence – to be debuted at a later date.

On a final note, a big “thank you” to Weenut for naming my cowl design.  If it were up to me it would be “Fall Braided Cable Cowl.”  Her creativity in naming is much appreciated!

And here it is, "Fall Twist Cable" photographed with the assistance of my 1/2 torso mannequin!