Knit Marvelous Modern Colorwork Cowls!

It’s that time of the year when falling temps and growing dread signal “it’s gift-knitting season!” Probably the only semi-positive thing about last year’s lockdown was that I could put my annual hat-knitting marathon on hiatus, since I knew I wasn’t going to actually see anyone. Bah-humbug. 

But. What if I changed my gift-knitting vibe from “how many can I knit of something” to “how cool can I make one thing . . . for a very special person?” If you feel that your gift-knitting needs a similar reboot, it might be time to watch Modern Colorwork Cowls from Kyle Kunnecke. Because you’ll learn not just how to design a special, personal, found-nowhere-else design, you’ll learn how to create that design using the initials of someone’s name. How special is that?

What You’ll Learn

Kyle covers all the basics to ensure your success.

Designing Colorwork Motifs

Haven’t done stranded colorwork in a while (or ever)? Not to worry; he’ll review it with you along with a section on color theory that helps you understand why some color pairings have punch, others are subtler, and still, others are just kind of blah. What sets this apart from other classes on colorwork, though, is that he doesn’t stop at showing you to knit motifs; Kyle shows you how to create your own and use them to design a spiffy custom cowl pattern.

Is your mind blown? Think about it this way: anything can be a motif. A leaf, a circle, the silhouette of a building or bridge, a chicken, the letter x. Just reduce the motif to its simplest form, then stack and repeat until you find a pleasing arrangement. (Even chickens can form a pleasing arrangement. Trust me.) Kyle shows you how to arrange motifs using a letter, say the letter L. Mess around with that L, stacking, wrapping, arranging, flipping, enlarging, shrinking, and doing who-knows-what-else with it. Suddenly, it doesn’t even look like an L anymore; it’s far more interesting. This is the key to Kyle’s genius: any image, if you mess around with it enough, becomes an abstract graphic that is just itching to become custom knitwear.

Kyle shows you how to look at the world around you (or Pinterest, or your favorite architectural website, or whatever) and pull out interesting shapes and details. Next, he shows you how to isolate a simple motif based on an image, then to arrange and rearrange it in charted form until you have a design you like.

Designing Colorwork Cowls

He’s not going to just leave you there with a bunch of motifs, though, no matter how handsome they are. His next step is to teach you how to take that graphic element and turn it into a custom cowl. You choose every aspect: length and width, gauge, number of repeats, and what kind of edging you want (if any). To make sure all these things work together, Kyle provides a handy worksheet and walks you through it, but the design is yours and yours alone. And you can do this for cowl after cowl (or hat, or socks, or sweater, once you get the hang of it).

Modern Colorwork Cowls was a really exciting concept for me. It’s a simple, thoughtful approach to design that has a big payoff, and you can take it as far as you like, as often as you like and never get bored. As the old saying goes, “Give a person a cowl, and you keep them warm for a season. Teach a person to design their own cowls, and you keep them (and their friends) warm and fashionably accessorized forever.”

Happy watching!
Allison

Originally posted 8/30/2017. Updated 9/22/2021.

Learn to Knit Colorwork Cowls along with Kyle