Designed by Stephanie Butland for Knit for Wildlife

The cowl is worked flat or in the round, based on your knitting experience and preference, and is then embroidered to suggest fishing nets and coral. In knitting the cowl you are creating a canvas which you will then embellish. If you belong to a knitting group, you might want to come together, pool your scraps, and share your experience of embroidery. Maybe talk about wildlife, and the sea, as you knit and sew.

To knit this cowl you will need the ability to cast on, knit, purl, and cast off (or someone to teach you these
things).

Size and Gauge: Sample measures 39cm wide and 41cm high, circumference 78cm
Gauge is not essential for this project. However, you will need to create a fabric that is sturdy enough to hold the embroidery stitches.
Sample gauge is 13 stitches and 18 rows per 4 inches/10cm.

Resources: For details of embroidery stitches used, you may find this page useful. And there’s a tutorial on duplicate stitch here.

Materials:
Yarn: 2 skeins of Malabrigo Chunky (100%wool; 95m/100g), or approx. 200m of bulky weight yarn, in a colour or colours that make you think of the ocean. For best effect, choose a solid colour, and a yarn that is smooth and evenly spun. The embroidery will not look so impactful on a multi-coloured or texture fabric.

You could: use a solid coloured yarn to make a background that will create a fully blank canvas for your embroidery use a variegated yarn to give a sense of fluidity of water use more than one colour in blocks to create a sense of depth stripe several colours to make the cowl more striking

Samples are knitted in: Azul Profundo (single colour cowl) Emerald and Bobby Blue (2 colour cowl)

For the embroidery: Scrap yarn, any weights, colours and lengths, so long as they all please you.

Needles: 8mm, straight or circular depending on your preferred way of knitting.
If working in the round, a stitch marker.
A yarn needle for embroidery.