Cheater Cowl

Warning: several of the following photos commit at least one of Alex Tinsley’s Seven Tacky Sins of Photography. It’s a great post. Read it, then come back here and learn from my mistakes. There’s a 8th sin that has to do with photographing outside when it’s cold enough that your nose turns the same color as your lipstick, but Alex forgot about that one.

Bumming around on the internet the other day I came across this post from Madigan Made on making cowls from old sweaters. The very next day I found this cashmere sweater languishing at Goodwill for $5:

Clearly, it was Meant To Be.

The sweater was a pretty shade of blue and very soft but happily so shapeless and unflattering that I knew I’d have no qualms about cutting it up. So I took it home and that’s exactly what I did:

And this is what I came up with :

And this is what it looked like as a loop:

Kind of cute, huh? And being cashmere, very soft and warm.

But that raw edge kind of nagged at me, so not being the type to leave well enough alone, I decided to slip stitch a row of crochet around the edge:

A few suggestions if you Try This At Home:

1. Keep it very loose; too tight and it will pull in the edge in an unattractive manner.
2. You may need to experiment with hooks. I started with a steel hook which was great for stabbing though the sweater fabric but tedious at pulling the fingering weight yarn through. I moved up to a 3.25 mm hook which was better for the yarn but made the stabbing part less fun. What works best will ultimately depend on the gauge of the sweater and the weight of the contrast yarn.
3. When you’re done, trim the edges as neatly as you can but DO NOT trim closer than 1/4″ to the single crochet line. Trust me on this one.

So that looked nice but I still wasn’t crazy about the raw edge up top so I decided to cover it up with single crochet. I began by using the same green yarn (Spud & Chloe Fine in Glow Worm, in case you were wondering). I basically stabbed the hook through each of the little slip stitches, pulled the yarn up and worked a single crochet over the edge.

This shows it well, but after a few inches I decided there was too much contrast—I didn’t like the way the blue showed through the green, so I switched to some teal colored yarn.

From here, it would have been very easy to crochet any kind of lacy edging on to it, but I wasn’t feeling frilly. I can see potential, though.

Though I prefer it as a cowl, this is what it looks like as a loop: