All About the Point Cowl Pattern

I'd known for a while I wanted to design a cowl with detailed colourwork, I just hadn't settled on exactly what this design should be. I decided this would be a great project for me to really experiment with the design, so I opened up my knitting chart software and started trying out different ideas. After a few different iterations I'd decided on a final design for the first section of the cowl and chose to focus on using triangles and lines throughout the pattern. I found the rest of the design came together quite quickly and easily, so it wasn't long before I had a completed first draft to try knitting.

Since the cowl has such detailed colourwork I knew I wanted to use colours with quite a lot of contrast to ensure the design looks very clear. One of the great things about fingering weight cowls is they don't require a large amount of yarn, so I had a look through all of the partial skeins in my stash until I found two Spectrum Fibre colourways I really liked together ('Origami' and 'Sugar Plum'). A great way to see if two colours contrast well with each other is to set your phone camera to use a black and white filter and take a photo of the colourways together, if they look very similar in the photo then they won't contrast much in your final project.

The first draft of the pattern actually included a split at the bottom edge of the cowl, this divided it into two halves which used a second colourwork chart that was worked flat for both sides of the cowl, with each of these halves having an I-cord edging. Unfortunately when designing patterns some ideas just don't end up working out. After I'd blocked the cowl I really wasn't happy with how these two sections would lay when it was worn. I felt that the cowl would look better if I removed these sections and instead just added ribbing like I'd used at the top of the cowl. Thankfully I'd used lifelines when knitting this project, which is always a good idea when designing in case you need to make any changes. I was able to unravel the project back to the lifeline before the split and simply add the ribbing. It was a bit discouraging to have to scrap the additional colourwork charts as I did really like these, however I knew making these changes was making the overall design much better.

I'm very happy with the final design and think it really fits my original vision of a detailed colourwork cowl. This project also gave me a lot of inspiration, so I've now got a number of other cowl design ideas I'm excited to work on!

Click the link below to check out the full details of the pattern.