After I designed the Lines and Vines Shawl Pattern – an idea for a cowl version immediately popped into my head! I had to design it with the same brioche vines and lines that made the shawl so wonderful!
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The Materials:
- The Lines and Vines Cowl Pattern
- 2 Skeins of DK Weight Yarn: Approximately 246 yards – 50g / 123 yards MC and 50g / 123 yards CC – I knit my samples from BreakingYarn.com
- Size US7/4.5mm Knitting Needles (I love my ChiaoGoo Red Lace Interchangeable set)
- Scissors
- Yarn Needle
- 1 Stitch Marker
The Design:
I wanted the cowl to be a seamless look where the brioche went all the way around the cowl with no seams or edges in the design! Being that it’s seamless, it was a little more challenging to figure out the stitches and making changes to make that work – but I did it!
The Pattern:
The Lines and Vines Cowl Pattern is available on Ravelry, Etsy, and BreakingYarn.com.
The Cowl features simple garter lines on both the top and the bottom edges of the cowl in a striped fashion. The brioche vines are sandwiched between the two garter line sections.
The cowl is knit completely in the round with two color brioche. The nice thing about knitting brioche in the round is that you never have to slide your stitches back to the beginning to knit the second color and you never have to knit the wrong side! You just go around and around alternating colors.
This was actually my first time doing brioche in the round and I’m completely and totally obsessed with it! I’m already dreaming up of my next two color brioche cowl!
Overall, I would say the pattern is easy to follow, but I would not call this pattern beginner friendly at all. It is more intermediate level. The brioche is a knitting technique that should probably be worked up first so you have a basic understanding of the stitches and how they are worked.
I do include a few YouTube video tutorials though that should help you with the increase/decrease rows if you are an optimistic knitter and are looking for a challenge!
The Yarn:
I used my Swish DK base in the colors Jane Margolis and Hazmat Suit from BreakingYarn.com. This yarn is so soft and squishy! It makes the best neckwear!
I knit two versions of this cowl – one where the main color was the Jane Margolis colorway in my Swish DK base and the contrasting color was the Hazmat Suit colorway in my Swish DK base and one where I switched the colors around.
I knit two versions for a few reasons:
1: I wanted to work out one small design error in the first cowl that I didn’t notice until I completely finished the cowl. I did get this worked out in the second version and it looks 100% amazing now!
2: I wanted to test it and see if I could make two cowls out of just 2 100 gram skeins of the yarn! I totally could! I was left with approximately 10 grams of Jane Margolis and 14 grams of the Hazmat Suit.
If you didn’t want to switch the main color and the contrasting colors around on the second cowl, I would bet that you could still knit two, but you might just have even less of your main color leftover or play a little bit of yarn chicken!
What about you – do you like brioche knitting? Have you ever made something with this technique? Please let me know in the comments down below!
The Reveal:
