When I told you about my Camilla hat, I hinted that there was also something warm and snuggly to for neck to match…

So what have I been knitting while the weather suddenly remembered it’s late spring and got “T-shirt” warm??

No, not a scarf….I’ve made the Jerri Cowl! A beautiful, incredibly practical, cosy-warm cowl design, again from Purl Alpaca.

Here’s the pattern pic..

If only I could look that good in this cowl!

I made it in ivory to match the Camilla hat. This was another commuting-knit project – easily fitting in my handbag.

Once I was past the start – this was an ideal train project – most of it is an easy fisherman’s rib, knit on a circular needle so no sewing up either 🙂

The start was surprisingly detailed (as ever with Kari-Helene’s designs)…

I used a long-tail cast on as I didn’t want a tight cast on to cause the cowl edging to pucker out of shape. The curse of a long tail cast on is that you don’t allow enough “tail” to finish casting on all the stitches. I got around this by loosely tying together the ends of two balls of yarn so my working yarn was from one ball and the tail was from a second. It gave me an extra end to darn in but when you are casing on nearly 250 stitches I could live with that 😉

After a few rounds of nice simple moss stitch there are bobbles – lots of them! Thankfully I remembered the trick I used for The Carol Cushion where I used  backwards knitting for the purl rows of the bobbles (backwards knitting is where you don’t turn the work at the end of a knit row but work from left to right with the right side facing you). This made it easier to do on the train without elbowing my fellow commuters in the eye while I worked 🙂

A few lacey rows and I was relaxing into the fisherman’s rib until I’d used up all of the three balls of yarn…Then the question of how to cast off?

I consulted my new favorite technical knitting book – Cast On/Bind Off by Leslie Ann Bestor – This book has 54 fully illustrated methods to cast on and bind off (Cast off if you’re English!!),  divided up into sensible categories like “stretchy bind off” and “decorative bind offs”with wonderfully simple advisc on  what application they are good for. I chose “Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy bindoff because I didn’t want the “granny made me a polo neck sweater” effect of a taught bind off that wouldn’t fit over my head and had all the give of a steel rope!

So after all that technical explanation – do you wanna see it?

I’m not sure I’d wear it on it’s own like this …

Here’s a better close up…

See that pretty, pretty edging?

And this is what it looks like under a coat…

Weird look on my face – I will never be a “model”!

I love the fact I can wear something flimsy to my rather overheated office and put on my Jerri Cowl to keep me warm and toasty for the commute – maybe I’m getting old but my neck does get colder than the rest of me!!

And lastly one with the matching  Camilla hat…

Loving that combo!

These of course will go beautifully with my Kitten Mittens 😀

Except it’s now getting  warm outside. I’m gonna have to wait for autumn to wear this little lot .  Bah! 🙁