Last year I made these brownies as my contribution to the potluck Super Bowl party:
This year I bought M&Ms for the party and engaged in the decidedly nontraditional activities of knitting and sipping on diet 7UP during the game. Fortunately, my partner in crafting crimes was working on a project, too, so the scoffing and disbelief at such irreverence was divided in two directions.
Just before Christmas, the Dolores Park Cowl was my first real attempt at knitting in the round. I got all stubborn about the yarn I wanted to use, so I doubled up on worsted-weight Malabrigo yarn to work with the kettle-dyed “purple magic” color and still get the chunky weight result. This also became my first attempt at knitting with a double strand.
Knitting in the round, check.
Knitting with double strand, check.
Modifying the patten, EPIC FAIL.
I wanted a bigger, floppier cowl to meet the requests of the recipient, so I doubled the cast-on. When I finished it looked horrible. Limp, lifeless, impractical. My knentor (pronounced kuh-nent-or, rhymes with dementor, translates to knitting mentor) made a valiant attempt to assuage my fears about the crappiness of the final product, until she viewed it with her own eyes. I accepted defeat, undid the entire project, and made a giant ball of yarn, with Christmas and gift-giving time less than a week away.
I found this modification, and decided to try again with a more reasonable goal, forgoing the big and floppy criteria. This began with separating the giant ball of yarn into two, which took almost two hours, one per ball (hehe). Then back to square one, buying new needles and starting the project over from scratch. The story ends happily, because the result was quite nice and not only appreciated by the recipient, but admired enough to garner a request to repeat the project for someone else. What else was I going to do with that extra ball of yarn?
My progress as of Super Bowl Sunday:
Again, this is Malabrigo worsted weight, kettle-dyed wool yarn in “purple magic.” All Malabrigo yarn highly recommended.
