The Dino Doodle Cowl: a Jurassic Undertaking

Stranded colourwork has been my white whale for some time now.

I’ve made many, many attempts but most of them have not turned out the way I want, and I knew I wasn’t going to get better at it without more practice. One particularly chilly late-November day, I was struck with the inspiration and motivation I needed. I wanted to make another Doodle Cowl, this time for my husband, as he was often borrowing my Autumn Doodle Cowl to shovel our driveway.

The Doodle series, designed by Jamie Lomax of Pacific Knit Co, are modular patterns to mix and match motifs or use as building blocks to create your own. Over the years, Jamie has put out several whimsical Doodle themes from seasonal holidays to worldly destinations. She even put out a whole book of Doodles this year!

I sent my husband a link to Jamie’s website, and told him to pick a theme. Ever the paleontological fanatic, it took mere seconds for him to hone in on the Dino Doodles pattern. Together we picked seven designs from the collection, with specific attention to triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex — my husband’s favourite dinosaurs. He also requested a blue colour scheme.

I used Canva to plan the layout of the cowl and Stitch Fiddle to transpose the PDFs into trackable charts and assign colours to each motif. I was determined to use yarn I already have and unearthed several blues and complimentary colours from within my stash, using equal parts DK yarns and fingering weight held double.

Stranded colourwork gets its name from the strands of yarn (“floats”) that are carried across the back of the work between colour changes. They can vary in length, and I thought they’d be irritating against my husband’s face or get caught on his glasses. So instead of working up a short tube, I made the tube similar to my Autumn Doodle cowl, extra-long with the beginning and end grafted together so the strands on the back of the work would be locked away. Leaving only the beautiful, smooth stockinette accessible.

Working on this cowl became a fun challenge for my brain, testing my pattern recognition abilities as the pictures formed. I became a yarn-fed printer, and it’s easy to see now how fibre arts were the precursor to modern computing.

Speaking of printing, my husband 3D-printed a handy gadget that was immensely helpful for this project, a yarn detangler. This Ferris wheel-shaped contraption employed physics to help keep multiple yarns from tangling around each other while I knit with them. It was especially handy for motifs that used three colours at once.

The end result of this cowl is one that I’m extremely proud of. My tension is even, the colours look fantastic together, and the images are recognizable. I still made a couple of small mistakes, but none that detract from the finished product.

I feel a lot more confident in my skills than before, and I think I’m ready to try making a stranded colourwork sweater again.