turbines

Turbines, a cowl, draped

Turbines, a cowl, folded

Turbines, a cowl, folding

I bought some yarn, enough I thought for a vest.  My calculations, sadly, were a bit off in the negative direction.  I love the yarn, Rowan Cashsoft Dk in a wonderful smokey gray so I decided to knit up a cowl of my own design.  As of late I have become enamored with the stitch pattern of YO, K2tog and the opposite, K2tog, YO.  This makes what to me looks like a trellis or a turbine.  Using these patterns in a circular fashion with the dark gray yarn it just looks so industrial, Steam Punk even.  I love it.  So I wrote down the pattern and it is available here, on ravelry as a free PDF download. 
Gray turbines to warm your neck, delicious.

So I had to make a holiday gift item for the yarn shop I work at (only a day a week, and then teach a few classes in the eves). I thought and thought, hhhmmmm, what will I do? So many things came to mind, not to mention that I had just made a pair of wrist warmers for a double pointed knitting needle class that I am teaching this fall. So I took a look around the shop for color inspiration...then it hit me! Minnow Knits Merino, a new yarn that is very soft and comes in these outrageous candy colors. I decided to go with a Swedish theme and came up with this little (not really little) cowl/neck warmer! Isn't it adorable! You could use it as a childs skirt too I suppose. The drawstring keeps it from crumpling down so you can admire the lovely striped pattern. Speaking of the stripes....I used this stripe generator to help me out. I just love it! I can hardly wait to use it again. Oh goodness, my secret is out now, all of you getting knitted gifts from me this Yule be warned, they will be striped! Gotta love those candy stripes...eat em up!