Heather Fair Isle Cowl

Now I've given you a brief introduction to how I designed my cowls, and showed you my Holyhead Mountain cowl - it's time to meet cowl number 2, Heather.

This cowl was born out of scanning and blowing up my paintings of heather by massive amounts. "That's a nice painting," my tutor would say. "Let's blow it up by 200% again!" The result was an abstract mishmash of colour and texture.

I, like before, took the information in the image and tried to replicate that in my knitting samples. I practised with different colour combinations, and found that using colours quite similar worked really nicely together, and created subtle, organic pattern. 

Intarsia interpretation, which I didn't like as much - blocks of colour are less visually appealing. 

The end pattern used 3 complementary colours in purple and pink tones, together with one turquoise contrast, mixed with pale green lace weight yarn to add extra depth and variation to the colour. I knitted this cowl with a provisional cast on, and joined it with kitchener stitch - rather than knitting it in the round as I did with the other ones. 

I really love how this pattern combines geometric and organic shapes to create a really unique and interesting design. 

Like the Holyhead Cowl, you can download the pattern from Ravelry, or buy the original cowl from my Etsy shop! Please take a look and have a go!