Elephant Cowl

According to my notes on Ravelry, I cast on for this project on January 17, 2019.

There are 299 rows.

For ease of math, I am calling it 300.

I timed how long a row took me, as one does. I averaged between 7 and 10 minutes per row, depending on how easily memorized the chart pattern was.

At the upper end with 10 minutes a row, that would be 3,000 minutes or 50 hours!

This does not include the provisional cast on or picking up the live stitches once I unzipped the provisional cast on.  This also does not include the 90 minutes it took to Kitchener stitch the two ends together.

For a cowl, this is a tremendous amount of time.

Compared to weaving, tea towels woven 24” wide and at a length of 36” each, I can prepare a warp, beam it, thread heddles, sley the reed, and lash on in fewer than eight hours. A simple treading pattern, like Peaceful Rhythm towels, averages no more than 45 minutes a towel.

That means in the 50 hours I spent on this cowl, I could have woven 56 tea towels.

Of course, it would take another 5 or 6 hours, if not more, to overlock the raw edges, hem, wash, and iron that many towels.

Even if I spent 8 hours dressing the loom and another 8 hours finishing the towels, in that 50 hours, I could have completed 25.5 tea towels.

I am actually a fairly quick knitter.

Entire sweaters have consumed less time than this cowl. The difference was reading the Fair Isle pattern from a chart and not just knitting from memory.

However, knitting takes significantly more time than weaving, which is one of the reasons I primarily focus on the weaving. Another major reason is I happen to find the objects produced on the loom are far more utilitarian in my life, than anything knitted.

Life in South Texas does not require much, if any, wool.

Despite ALL that, I do still enjoy knitting, but on a limited basis. I find it harder on my fingers and hands, as well as neck.

What I love most about it is the squishy soft feel of the wool in my hands. Knitters refer to this as the hand of the yarn. There is nothing like it.

As to this project, I could not be more pleased.

The pattern is actually easy, well written, and straight forward.

Instead of using the yarns in specific colors as instructed, I decided to use Freia Handpaints Ombré Shawl Ball fingering in Ice Queen and Pt Reyes.

This was a rather expensive choice, as the cowl required two balls of each color, although I have more than half of each of the second balls remaining.

I cast on using the two colors I liked the most, the blue and light brown.

I knit through the first two charts and a quarter of the way through the third and final chart where the colors had changed to white and darker slate grey.

With about 70 rows left to knit, I made an executive decision. I was running out of the original balls of yarn and I would need to tap into the second balls. My choices were two: As I finished with the white and grey, I could continue to knit in the white and grey or I could pick up the stitches from the original provision cast on and begin knitting with the blue and light brown, as I had done originally.

The second option was a deviation from the pattern, but the pattern had also called for multiple color changes throughout that I had simply ignored. 

I obviously wanted to use more of the first two colors, so I moved my live stitches onto longer needles and secured the tips. Then, I unzipped my provisional stitches, did one round of plain knitting in the blue, turned the pattern upside down, and began knitting from row 299 back to where I had stopped knitting in the white and grey on row 229. 

However, originally, I used the light brown as the pattern and the blue for the background, I switched this when I added the new balls of yarn with light brown as the background and blue for the pattern. I am not sure it made much of a difference. 

In the middle of this photo is the solid blue line, which indicates where the provisional stitches were and the first row I knit from the new ball of yarn. Everything above that solid blue line was the first thing I knit, everything below it is the new. 

Here is the final kitchener join. 

While there is a stark difference in colors and obvious line, the pattern actually matches up beautifully. This does not bother me, either, as the original pattern called for blocks of contrasting colors throughout. My plan is to have the join at the back of my neck when I wear it. 

I am definitely keeping and wearing this. 

When I announced the same, the husband gave me a look. He is well aware I rarely wear my own hand knits and usually give 95% of everything I have ever made away; however, I have 50 hours of my life in this thing. I do not know of anyone deserving of that much of my time!! HA!

Moreover, no one has ever spent that much time on me.

Besides, I deserve it!