There’s a saying about something burning a hole in your pocket. To most people aware of the phrase it means you have money and you want to spend it. To me it means there’s a pressing need to do something with something I have in my possession and that something is usually yarn. I’ve been holding onto one skein of Buffalo Gold’s #12 Lux Laceweight while I considered the right project for it. Dyed by Lorna’s Laces the skein’s colors capture autumn’s splendor. How fitting that I am knitting with it now.
Lux has the rarity and uniqueness that I like in yarn. Give me a label that reads bison, cashmere and silk and I have to knit with it. And so every night for the past week I have been knitting the Braided Cowl from Vogue Knitting Holiday 2009 magazine.
Simple and ingenious best describes the cowl. It’s made up of four separately knitted strips, each strip slightly longer than the other. The strip itself is merely a succession of 18-stitch cables worked in opposite directions. The strips are stacked starting with the shortest and moving down to the longest. They are then tacked together at various points and the ends sewn together to close the cowl. I’ve already finished two of the strips and am well into the third. Though the yarn is spun as laceweight I’m working on US 6 (4mm) needles and completing a strip in about two nights. I’ll need an additional skein to finish the cowl.
I’m thinking this cowl could be a great gift, one in which the creating is equally joyful to the giving. As it is the yarn’s manufacturer, Buffalo Gold, is donating a portion of their sales of this yarn to stores like us to Heifer International. The other colors of Lux in this limited edition Conservation Colorway series are as hard-to-resist as my color, Red River. Um…maybe I’ll break my rule of not repeating a project.
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