I bought the most amazing (and, admittedly expensive) hand-dyed yarn pack at Napier’s Knit August Nights back in August 2016. The yarn seller had knitted up a beautiful cowl as a sample in a Honeycomb pattern. I tried it on. It was airy, comfortable, and simply beautiful to look at. I was transfixed! Frugality took a back seat. I bought the yarn pack and hurried home to start knitting.

Once home, reality took over in the form of a busy two-year-old, and the knitting of the Honeycomb Cowl took a back seat. For about a year.

Then one day, after a good many tiny cardigans had made it off the needles, I decided it was time to make something for myself. I cast on. With only the remembered instructions for the number of cast-on stitches hastily scribbled down on the packaging for guidance, I looked up a nice Honeycomb pattern in my stitch dictionary and began to knit. It was complicated, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I knitted in waiting rooms, in hospital rooms, while waiting in the car, in bed at night – whenever I could snatch a stitchy moment, frankly.

At last, the Honeycomb cowl was complete. I put it on.

And man, was it UGLY! It was the most unflattering accessory I had ever had the misfortune to wear. It wasn’t even comfortable! Obviously something had gone wrong, more likely in the remembering of the cast-on instructions than in the knitting.

So I pulled the whole thing undone, re-balled the yarn, and began again with a different pattern. Five attempts (and five unravellings) later, I finally hit upon a pattern I liked. And this time, being wiser (and considerably older!), I have only knitted up half of the yarn pack. I shall use the pack to make TWO cowls, both in the same pattern but with different colours.

Alice likes this one so much that she has very generously offered me a “Cowl Warming Service”, whereby she says she will wear and warm my cowl for me until I am ready to put it on myself! I imagine I will have to keep reminding her that this is something I have knitted for Mama. Getting it made has certainly been a battle, so I’m not ready to have it commandeered by a sly six-year-old!

If you want to try your hand at making this, without the many years of trial and error, I used pattern 230 from Japanese Knitting Stitch Bible by Hitomi Shida. I have used the English translation of the book, published by Tuttle. The pattern is a 12 stitch pattern formed over 10 rows.

The yarn is 4-ply. I used a 3.25mm circular needle and cast on 144 stitches (allowing for 12 blocks of pattern). I repeated the pattern ten times, finishing with 3 rows of simple Knit 1 Purl 1 rib on a size 2.5mm circular needle to stop the top edge from gaping. The cowl was finished with a stretchy cast-off (bind-off).

Happy knitting!