Love Is All You Knit

I’ve had two skeins of this soft Misti Alpaca Chunky in my stash for almost three years.  I always wanted to do something really fun with it, but it had to be just right for the yarn, which is so soft and squishy, its just heavenly.  I decided that a cowl was probably the best way to go due to my limited yardage.

I couldn’t decide on a pattern. I’ve had an idea floating around in my head for quite a while of the perfect infinity scarf/cowl.  I wasn’t really sure how to go about making what I was envisioning, so I searched around for a pattern. Nothing was quite right.

So I decided to just go for it- I cast on 36 sts on size US 15 needles and started knitting a tube.  I knit through both skeins and then grafted the ends together…. and viola!

The perfect infinity cowl was born!

PDF of the pattern here: Infinity Cowl

So what do you do when you haven’t bought yarn in a looooong time and someone sends you a knitpicks gift card?
You don’t take into consideration that you’re still slogging away on a sweater that you cast on for two years ago, and you don’t take into consideration that you’ve promised to knit your sweetie a cardigan. Instead, you logon immediately and buy a whole sweater’s worth of yarn for yourself and then sit and count down the days until it arrives in your mailbox, itching to cast on.
This, my friends is precisely why you should not put yourself on an involuntary and prolonged yarn diet. You end up making rash, selfish decisions while completely ignoring your lack of knitting speed, or the “I swear I’ll knit you a cardigan” promises that you’ve made.
But I can’t let myself cast on for that cardigan until I have finished knitting Thermal. I was zooming away at the sleeve last night and then something went horribly wrong. It was right there, at the intersection of two DPNs, at the end of the round: one of my stitches a few rows down looked loose and saggy and I half-convinced myself that I’d dropped a stitch. (It was hard to tell exactly what was going on cause there were some increases thrown in, and the waffle pattern….) So I laddered down and picked back up the same stitches, finally convinced that I hadn’t dropped a stitch after all, that it had just been wonky. Two rounds later, that same area was all of a sudden all bunched up and tight on my needles. Something was amiss, and I had no power to stop it. So I had to tink back about six rounds. By then I was so exhausted and aggravated that I just put it down for the night and poured a glass of wine. I still have no idea what happened or how it ended up that way.

So back to the new exciting yarn purchase; I bought Swish worsted to make Dexter by ZephyrStyle. I also promised Joey that I’d knit him the Smokin cardigan by BrooklynTweed. Maybe I can knit them simultaneously? By the time I’m finished with Thermal it will probably be warm outside. Surely there’s nothing weird about knitting two cardigans at the same time in the middle of summer. Is there?