In Which the Pirate Knits a Gift for Grandma.

That secret gift I mentioned in my last post is a neckwarmer/cowl for Grandma! I knit it with a yak/silk blend that I spun a couple of years ago, but didn’t know what to do with it… until now. The pattern is Polyphylla, which is available for free on Ravelry.

I really enjoyed knitting this pattern, not to mention knitting with my own handspun yarn of silky warm softness. It’s well-written, though I was a little bit unsure about the instructions to shift the stitch marker for the beginning of the round. Fortunately it’s so easy to see where one is in the pattern by looking at what’s already been knit, so I got around the confusion easily enough. The bindoff makes a really nice edge, but as I mentioned in my previous post, uses up a lot more yarn than I expected!

The cowl used one skein of my handspun yarn, and I am absolutely loving the self-striping effect that I produced! The only thing is, I had two… and they had slightly different yardage, and I don’t know if this was the 118-yard skein or the 140-yard skein. I’ll have to remember to re-measure the remaining yarn before I start another project with it, just to be on the safe side.