When I finish a knitting project, I often think about using up all the leftover yarn, rather than returning it to the stash. I finished my Wilhelmina reindeer cardigan (that link goes to my blog post) in Rowan Colourspun (that link goes to Ravelry, since the yarn is discontinued) this fall and have quite a few balls of that yarn leftover. I also have some left from the mister’s Skye vest (blog post link), even after making my own Comfort Fade cardigan (blog post link). I’ve made a pullover out of Colourspun too and, while I don’t like the fit of the body so much, I love its big squishy collar. That made me think of cowls.
The Cupido Cowl pattern is free on Ravelry and that’s a Ravelry link. There are several thousand projects, so there’s a lot of eye candy to explore. (Four of them were worked in Colourspun, too.) Although it calls for aran weight yarn, it’s the kind of pattern that can be worked in any yarn. I liked the appearance of the pattern stitch, and the directions by another Raveller for making it in two colours (see my Ravelry project page for the link) so cast on. Because Rowan Colourspun is a DK weight yarn, my cowl will be smaller in diameter and I’ll have to work more repeats to get the depth of the cowl shown. How much shorter? How many more rows? There was only one way to find out.
I cast on with the red (Appletreewick) and used the green (Pen Y Ghent) as the contrast colour. I used 4.5mm needles as that’s one size up from the recommended size for this yarn. I figured that would make a more supple fabric. Colourspun has a slow variegation in each colourway and both of these colourways include similar accent colours. I knew this would blur the distinction between them. Here’s the glorious tweedy-looking result:
The colours do look brighter in the pictures than they appear in real life.
And here’s the finished cowl:
In the end, I worked 9 repeats of the pattern stitch instead of 8 and used about 60g of the red (just over one ball) and 50g of the green (1 ball). I could have made it deeper, but I ran out of Pen Y Ghent. The finished cowl is 7.5″ deep and 42″ around.
I’ve worn this a fair bit. It is odd that it doesn’t have a front fastening, although I’m sure I could add one. I do think I mucked up the sleeve decreases as they’re narrow – fine for wearing but less fine for pushing up to the elbow as I’m inclined to do with my sweaters. They’re also a bit long for me. And I know that I somehow did too many short rows on the collar: it’s quite substantial! That makes it snuggly, though – and is one of the hazards of knitting anything other than plain rows while watching tv.
I picked up the stitches to do the neck next (before the sleeves) to manage my yarn. I didn’t have enough of all the colourways, so decided to do the neck, then use half of whatever was left for each sleeve.
I did decide to frog and reverse the order of the colourways on the collar, picking up with my last colour, which is the brown. It blends in better and looks neater. See?
For this project, I raided my stash and chose my leftovers of Rowan Colourspun. I had knitted Mr. Math a vest in this yarn, then bought more to make myself a sweater when it was discontinued. Here’s 
Here’s the cardigan as of last Sunday. I’d just divided for the arms. You can see that the ribbing for the neckline has a good bit of space to fill – this sweater is designed to be worn open, so the fronts with the ribbing will just meet. It’s also designed so that the purl side is worn out, which makes it look even more blended.
First, here’s the issue of VK (fall 2016) and the hat in question. The hat is in the 
What do you think?
Alive & Knitting 