Custom Capelet

I love knitting and the results that it can yield. I love how knitting can make a boring movie or a hockey game that I'm stuck watching fly by. I love how I can sit and socialize and knit at the same time. What I don't love about knitting, however, is spending hours upon hours making something and then realizing that it didn't quite turn out the way it was supposed to. I have the tendency to alter new patterns (and recipes, too) and they don't always work out. If I mess up dinner, oh well, I'll throw a pizza in the oven or we'll struggle through it. Messed up knitting, however, can mean many hours and skeins of beautiful yarn wasted. 

I recently set out to make a beautiful herringbone cowl found on a very lovely knitting website called The Purl Bee. Included with the pattern is a pretty good step-by-step instruction on how to do the herringbone stitch, and I set out to make my own cowl which was supposed to comfortably wrap twice or maybe even thrice around my neck. I used a different type of yarn than the recommended worsted, and fewer stitches since I wanted mine good and snug. I had 3 skeins of beautiful mustard yellow yarn that I'd been dying to use, and estimate putting about 40 hours of knitting time into the scarf. The result: it was so tight to my neck that I felt like I was wearing a wool neck brace. It was not good, but there was no way I was going to admit defeat. It was time to get creative.

I used Bernat's Roving yarn in Amber, which simply did not have the give that the worsted would have, so there's very little stretch to be had. My first thought was to cut through it, sew in the ends, and make a normal scarf including tassels made from the leftover scraps of yarn. This seemed very time consuming, however, and I wasn't sure how good of a job I would do of tying in the loose yarn. Also, the scarf wouldn't be very long. Plan B, the one I ended up administering, was simply folding part of the cowl in on itself and sewing on some buttons to make it into a shrug or semi-cape-type thing.

The buttons I purchased from a cute knitting store in downtown Prince Albert (Saskatchewan). They were handmade by a fellow in Ontario. At the time I bought them without an idea of what I would do with them, and I'm glad that I did.

I'm pretty pleased with the idea, and if I want I can always take off the buttons and try the scarf option, since I didn't cut it in any way. It's not something that I would wear often, but I feel like I'll be able to pull it off once in a while; it seems like the type of thing one would wear in a ski chalet with a mug of hot chocolate. Hmmm...I'll have to start skiing. I could wear it at the office, I suppose, it's always a bit chilly in there. Otherwise...an art gallery opening? An episode of "Little House on the Prairie"? Any ideas?

So I think I've learned my lesson for now: I'm too new to knitting to be changing patterns. I wasn't familiar with the stitch and I'm not sufficiently yarn-savvy to be able to decide what type of yarn to use other than what was recommended in the first place. For my next few projects I'll stick closely to the pattern and hopefully have greater success. 

I'm not too upset, however, about this result. It was fun to try and figure out what might work. And when I do wear my capelet out, it will be virtually guaranteed that no one else in the room (or maybe the world) will be wearing the same thing. And that is what knitting is all about.