If you have a couple of skeins of yarn, you can make a nice neckwarmer. This one is knitted in a tube with yarn dyed with my old friend, St. John’s Wort. One side looks like this, with a green background and yellow patterning.

Here is the other side of the tube, with the colors switched; now we have a yellow background and green patterning.

The two halves of this cowl are reciprocals of each other, so I used the same amount of each color: 65g (that is about 3oz). This yarn has about 110 yards/oz, so that makes about 330yd/300m of each color.

Yarn choice is a bit tricky, as I want the colors to live in the same world but be different enough to show the pattern. I might go more muted this time, with two skeins made from aster flowers. I dyed these as whole skeins (about 4oz/100g each), so I will have plenty of each color regardless of what I choose. Oh. This is a fingering weight yarn.

I chose the middle mellow yellow yarn and the bottom green/gray yarn - nice choice, eh?

This cowl is a variation on a pattern called Harbour Cowl by Andrea Williamson, from the 2021 Shetland Wool Week Annual (Volume 7).

Yarn: Fingering weight, two colors, 4oz/100g each (this is generous)

Needles: Circular, 16in/40cm, size to suit your knitting; I used US No.1/2.25mm

Gauge: Negotiable

With the main color (MC), provisionally cast on 144 stitches. This is Row 1 of the chart. Begin by knitting Row 2 of the chart. Repeat the 36-stitch chart four times per round.

Work all rows of the chart twice for the cowl, switching MC and contrast color (CC) after you have worked the last row of the chart for the first time.

Stop working the second repeat of the pattern after you have worked the second-to-last row of the chart. The last row will be the weaving-in row. Weave the ends of the tube together with your current MC.

N.B. There is actually no MC or CC, for this cowl - or rather, both yarns are MC and CC, but for each half of the tube, you will have to designate one of them MC and the other CC, and then for the second half of the tube, switch the designations.

This pattern will give you the first cowl shown above. I was trying to represent pine cones and was only partly successful, but it is still pretty. The colors in this chart make me hungry. I am going to dig in my stash and see if I can find some purples to play with.

Cones and Crosses

This is the chart for the second, paler cowl. The tracks look more like bushes, but there you are.

Foxes and Tracks

I made this one just like the cones and crosses cowl above, but only did three repeats of the 36-stitch pattern, not four.

This cowl is about 7.5” tall and 26” around. This yarn is a real fisherman’s wool, Frangipani, and has a totally different essence than the KnitPicks Palette that I used for the other two cowls.

Here is another one, made with charcoal and natural shetland wool (Jamieson and Smith).

And here is the light side.

And here is the inside!

And here it is, ready for work. I cannot tell if I wove in the ends on this side . . .

I will post a chart for this beauty asap.