Honey Cowl Finished Object: Learning, Frogging, and Finally Finishing

So I have been working on the Honey Cowl for a while now. It is not that it has taken me a long time to knit, it is that I am still fairly new and made a few boo-boos. Being the OCD person that I am, I just could not live with them.

For starters, let’s talk yarn.

or this project, I am knitting the Honey Cowl by Antonia Shankland. I am using two yarns for this piece and love how well they work together. I am using Cascade 220 Heathers along with a local hand-dyed yarn from Yarns by HPF. I was so excited to find a hand-dyed yarn that matched the Cascade yarn as well as it does.

The Cascade 220 Heathers is in the Burnt Pumpkin 2453 colorway, dye lot 5114. I am using one full skein, which equals 220 yards. This yarn was purchased at Yarns by HPF.

The second yarn is Yarns by HPF Domestic Alpaca in a rust and brown colorway. I am using approximately 167 yards of this yarn, which is about 0.83 skeins. This yarn was also purchased at Yarns by HPF.

The total yardage used for this project is 387 yards. I am knitting this cowl on US 8 needles, which are 5.0 mm.

I knew going into this project that I wanted to do a striped pattern, but I also wanted a thicker section in the center to give the cowl a little more weight and structure. I worked on it for a while and then managed to knit one row backward. At first, I thought it was just one row, and it would not matter. That row, however, kept jumping out at me, yelling, “Hey, look at me. I am your big, ugly row.”  

                         

Needless to say, I do not take smack from my yarn or my projects, so I ripped it back to the brown section. That would have been an easy fix if the whole thing had not come off the needles while it was in my bag. It was such a mess that I completely frogged the entire project and started over on October 11.

There is a picture where you can still see the row that sits wrong, and yes, it still bothers me.

So I cast on the Cascade 220 again, and this time I did not mess up. I am doing a lot of car knitting and hospital knitting while staying overnight with my baby, and it has actually been a comforting project to have in my hands. I am loving the pattern and the stripes, and the colors I chose are working beautifully together.

I finished the cowl on October 31 and blocked it that night.

Here it is, all finished.

Despite the setbacks, I am really happy with how this turned out. This project taught me patience, how to fix mistakes, and when it is worth starting over to get a result I truly love.

You can find the pattern here:

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/honey-cowl