During the 2021 Covid lockdown in Sydney, there was a fabulous online yarn festival called The Big Wool Show. During the show I bought four skeins of dk/8 ply yarn from VK Yarns. VK Yarns specialises in dyeing cotton yarn in fabulous bright colours. Hand-dyed cotton really appealed to me because there's only so many days of the year that I can bear to wear wool in Sydney!
I bought 2 skeins of Bubblegum Unicorn and 2 skeins of Galaxy.
I wound them. I fondled them. I swatched them. It took me ages to find the right thing to design with these skeins. Fortuitously though, I had been working on my Ginan jumper pattern for Moorit magazine not long before. That's using assigned colour pooling yarn with colour pops - just one contrasting colour. My VK Yarns were more colourful but I realised I could use the same random bobble principal as the lengths of colour were about right for bobbles. So I got to working on some cowls.
I wanted these cowls to be kinda beginner friendly. As in, not for a total newbie but for someone who has made some basic squares and maybe a straight scarf but not much else. The Bobble Cowl eBook has four cowls which are presented by skill level - easiest first to hardest last. None are particularly difficult and they are all quick makes. My testers churned these out in a couple of days a pop. The patterns have some video support for the tricky bits - connecting stitch, how to make bobbles, how to increase in the back bump and the start of the Bandanna cowl.
Here are my cowls - Straight Shooter, Tapered, Chevron and Bandanna.
Anu's yarn had very short colour changes so her bobbles aren't in a contrasting colour to the rest of the cowl.
Melissa of Sydney based dye-house, Three Cat's Yarn did a special dye run for her Straight Shooter Cowl.
Cindi used Hobby Lobby commercial yarn for her Straight Shooter Cowl. Works really well.
Clare ended up making two cowls, one modelled by her and the other by her Hubby.
Left is Bandanna and right is Tapered.
Mary made her bobbles in two colours like I did for the Galaxy colour way.
Sam of Sydney based dye-house Call of the Yarn also used her own hand dyed yarn. I LOVE this one!
And Jenny's Tapered Cowl turned out a little larger than expected but look how snuggly it is!
You can purchase your copy of this pattern using the links here.