Porcellana Cowl

I saw this cute little cowl pattern on KnitPicks a while ago, and thought it looked like a quick and easy little lace project.  Their Shadow lace yarn is a lovely heathered wool, so I ordered some in a nice deep red, to try it out.

Of course I can never let things be simple, so I decided to swap out one of the lace motifs (a zig zag that I didn't really like) for a different lace motif (a sort of leaf or petal design) and rewrote the chart by hand with that substitution.  It turned out to be a bit of a complicated pattern, with one motif containing lace on both sides (i.e. no rest rows on the wrong side) and several different motifs across the width, so I never managed to memorize certain parts of it and needed to refer to the chart the whole time.

After listening to about a million podcasts on my brand spankin' new iPad, I discovered that I'd finished the knitting, so last night I blocked it out on the living room floor, and today I grafted the two ends together to make a lovely long cowl.

The website suggests that you can wear it long "for a chic look" but I didn't feel particularly chic with it like that.  Maybe it's just me.  Of course, one little twist and doubling it up makes a pretty and featherweight cowl that sits like a cloud around the neck and looks lovely, too.

That's one more in the "completed" column.