I found this yarn in my mohair bin today and decided it needed to grow up already and become a knit object.

Cast on 83 stitches since I’m using smaller needles and I want this to be a slouchy cowl. Decided after about 6 rows that I wanted to do the increases, except that since I’d started out at a much larger stitch size, I decided to decrease instead. So, after about 15 rows I randomly chose to k10, and then k2tog all the way around. That left me with 77 stitches. I like the decreases better because m1s often leave little holes that annoy the heck out of me.

I knit another 12-15 rows and then decreased again by k9, k2tog. It came out evenly and I had 70 stitches. I knit another 15 or so rows.Then I decided to get creative.

Starting at the place marker, I knit a quarter of the way around, placed a marker and bound off one stitch, knit halfway around, placed a marker and bound off another stitch, and then knit around to the center marker again.

I removed the center marker, knit to the 1st stitch marker, and then bound off one stitch. Then, turning the work, I purled back to the other stitch marker, bound off one stitch again, and turned the work. I continued back and forth in Stockinette stitch in this manner a few times, making sure I bound off one stitch. Then I changed it up and did some shaping, binding off two, then three, then four, and then finally all of the stitches at the end to create a high-necked back collar effect.

Once I bound off, I went back to the stitches that I’d ignored at first (the ones that had been just hanging out on the curve of the circular). I attached the end of the yarn and began knitting back and forth in St st until I created a nice curve. I think I could have made it even more dramatic, but by then it was 2 a.m. and I just didn’t much care. This was a prototype anyways, as I flubbed up the binding off of the collar, but that’s cool.

I got this idea because I thought a nice, high collar to keep the back of your neck warm would look awesome, rather like the way the man in Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” is holding the back of the woman’s neck.

I checked first, and surprisingly, even through 93 pages of “cowl” designs, nobody’s thought up this design up before. Huh! Now to write up a pattern!