mcn lace | First Light Handcrafts

Sometimes, a gal just needs mindless knitting. There are knit nights, lunch hours with a friend, airports and parent visits. These things all require knitting where I am not trying to remember where the cable crosses are, or how many knit stitches between the YOs and k2togs.

Enter, the Reunion Cowl. Utterly brainless knitting that can be done just about anywhere. And when it’s done with indigodragonfly MCN Lace (now known as MerGoat Lace), it’s pure pleasure to knit.

This is my second of these; the first was knit in a OOAK blue-green colourway in late 2012. But I was always wishing for a red one and Kim and Ron created this lovely colouway a few years back that just cried out to be my newest cowl.

MCN/MerGoat Lace in “Only The Exact Word Word I Used Was ‘Don’t'”

It took a while to knit up, mostly because it was my carry around knitting so I wasn’t entirely devoted to it. I love the way it turned out. Long enough to double up for extra warmth and wonderfully soft and squishy.

I made a couple of alterations, including knitting the first set of garter rounds as flat rows and doubling up the number of eyelet rows to add both visual and knitting interest.

I am sure this won’t be my last one of these. They are a nice change from plain-ish socks when I am looking for easy knitting.

Pattern: Reunion Cowl by Natalie Selles

Yarn: indigodragonfly MCN/MerGoat Lace in “Only The Exact Word Word I Used Was ‘Don’t'”

Who Was It Made For? Me

Were There Changes Made To The Pattern? Added extra eyelet rows to alleviate boredom, and knit the first garter section and seamed it to help avoid twisting my cast on and to avoid purling. I have an unnatural aversion to purling, especially when the rounds are some 300+ stitches long.

Did I Learn Anything New? No

Anything Else? Not that I recall.

Would I Make Another?: Likely!

For the past few months, I have been valiantly chugging away at two pairs of fingering weight socks, one for my Mom and one for my Dad. It all started when I was at home in Newfoundland this summer. Mom decided she liked the pair of Hermione’s Everyday Socks I was working on, and because she had caught me at exactly the right point in the process and I was not all that enamoured with them, I offered to finish them to fit her. Once she had them, she told me she loved them and would really love another pair to go with her brown jeans. My parents have never asked me to knit them anything, ever, so I thought that was the least I could do.

Now, there are two things you should know about this. My mother has a size 10.5 foot – I have a size 7 foot. So as you can imagine these socks require an awful lot more stitches than I usually have to knit to finish a pair of socks.

The bigger issue: I loathe brown. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns. (That’s a slight exaggeration – indigodragonfly makes a Captain Tightpants colourway that I like, and I don’t mind it in variegated colourways like the ones in my Stillwater scarf…but that’s about it). So it should be telling of how much I love my Mom when I tell you that I knit a pair of size 10.5 brown socks for her.

It gets better. I cannot knit my mother two pairs of socks, and not knit any for my father. That just won’t do at all. This necessity for equality is come by honestly. When my brother and I were children, Mom kept a running account of what she spent on each of us at Christmas to make sure the numbers were even. So I ask Dad what colours he would want, since of course I need to knit him two pairs as well. His answer? Dark blue and….brown. Normally, being the dutiful daughter, I would have asked him which socks he wanted first; I skipped that step and cast on the Sweet Fiber Seastorm ones. Because one more brown pair of socks might have killed me. He’ll get the brown ones in the spring. After which I will be declaring a moratorium on brown knitting for a minimum of six months.

I am at the gusset decreases of the second Seastorm sock. It’s not brown but it’s still not exactly colourful. Last night, out of pure desperation, I cast on a Reunion Cowl. In indigodragonfly MCN Lace. In the most stunning red in the world, made even better by being named after one of my favourite TV characters…Inara from Firefly.