I used vintage 4ply / fingering weight wool from stash. I wound 10 x 25g balls (250g) in 10 different colours to see what I could make. I guess you could use 10 x 25g balls of Jamieson & Smith Jumperweight or Jamieson of Shetland spindrift or JC Rennie instead. If you’re interested in helping me with a big destash, I am selling some of my wool, already wound into 25g balls and in packs of 10 on ebay where you can find me as colour_worker. It does need to be washed well as it has machine knitting oil spun through as part of the spinning process but it blooms and blocks beautifully.

For the Cowl, I did a provisional cast on of 144 stitches using a 3.25mm needle.

I picked various small fairisle patterns from “The Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting by Sheila McGregor (see picture 5) and worked in the round for 30 inches and then grafted the cast on stitches to my last round, creating a tube.

For the hat, I cast on 144 with 2.75mm circular needle.

1 Worked 9 rounds of 1 x 1 corrugated rib.

Then I changed to 3.25mm circular needle and used whatever wool I had left to work 4 repeats of the same motifs and then I made the crown up as I went along.

I tried to use the different colours evenly so that I wouldn’t run out of any!