Holiday Knitting
It’s that time of year again. I usually give several handknit items as gifts each year. I am blessed in that my family and several of my friends like and apprecriate hand-knitted gifts.
I have just finished my first bit of holiday knitting. It is a reversible cowl that is part of the Wrapped Ribs Scarf/Cowl pattern recently released by my friend Natalie Servant. I had some of my cash sock in the caribbean waters colourway leftover from my Bel Air sweater which I thought would be perfect for the fingering weight version of the cowl. Unfortunately when I finished the first inch or so, I decided that the variation in the colourway was obscuring the pattern too much. I remembered that I had some semi-solid green sock yarn leftover from another project and it turned out to be similar to the green in my caribbean waters yarn so I cast on for the worsted weight version of the cowl double-stranding the two sock yarns together. 
This worked very well as there was still a little bit of variation to make the finished project look interesting but not too much to obscure the pattern. I used about 160 m of each yarn to knit a 8/12 inch tall cowl which
made this a great stash busting project for me.
The one change I made to the pattern was to use an I-cord cast-on (link to video tutorial here) as suggested by someone in Natalie’s ravelry group and folowed by an I-cord cast-off. This takes a little longer but it does really provide very nice looking edges.
I created a holiday knitting thread in my ravelry group as a place to share holiday projects and pattern suggestions. I hope that you will check it out.