Finished waffle cowl

After finishing Mum’s blanket I had around 125g of the James C Brett marble chunky yarn left. This wasn’t enough to do much with. At about the same time I came to the realisation that the reason I find some of my woollen scarves/items itchy around the neck area might be a sensitivity thing. These combined to make me wonder what I could do with 125g (approx. 200 yards) of chunky acrylic yarn in the neck department, and whether this would help me work out about the sensitivity thing. I made use of ravelry’s advanced pattern search and came across quite a few different cowl designs. Originally I was going to do this one but after starting it I didn’t like how it was looking with this yarn and so unravelled it back to the start.

Waffle washer

A few weeks ago I’d made a sample square using the waffle stitch (as per this pattern) and thought it looked amazing - really 3 dimensional - but it’s also very one sided. The reverse isn’t anything like as exciting, so I decided that it wasn’t really suitable for a scarf. I then spotted this and combined them both together to make my own waffle cowl. I used the dimensions and the general structure from the wiffely waffley cowl with the stitch instructions from the waffle stitch scarf as I wanted to have nice big squares in my cowl.

I think I used 68 stitches - 3 x 22 + 2 - and did a foundation double crochet round, 10 full waffle rounds (i.e. 2 rounds to make a full square), finishing up with one half waffle round but using half double crochet stitches instead of double crochet to keep the top edge straight, and finished with a row of single crochet to try and even it up with the bottom round. This makes it about 10 inches deep. At the back of the cowl I’d joined every round up with a slip stitch, which did mean that it didn’t have a nice neat square at the back, but had a huge rectangle instead. After finishing the final round of single crochet, I took a needle and my yarn and stitched over the middle double crochet stitch - where the raised bar would have been - and gave it the raised profile of the other parts of the cowl. If I look closely I can spot it, but it passes a casual glance.

With lego minifigs for scale

The yarn was mostly a pleasure to work with, it was certainly soft, but it did have quite a few knots in the ball which meant a few more stops and starts and more weaving in of ends. The variegation works really nicely, it adds character to it and doesn’t detract from the pattern. It also worked up really quickly - in all this took only 5 or 6 hours to make (and I’m quite slow).

The cowl is really warm and cosy. And I absolutely love the three dimensionalness of it. It stands up on its own too!

Upstanding cowl