The storytelling that often accompanies recipe blog posts has become a bit of a joke on the Internet, with people who just want the recipe already complaining about the fact that the author tells the whole back story of the dish, their family’s reaction, the history of the herb cilantro, before they share the ingredients.
Of course the reason many people write posts like that is because the algorithms tend to prefer longer posts, and you can get more keywords into a post that has more words in general.
As a blogger I don’t mind the storytelling much, and while this trend isn’t found in knitting patterns as much as it is in recipes, sometimes it’s nice to get the backstory on a meal, or, in this case, a knitting pattern.
I think it’s worth reading the story that comes before the pattern on this one. The Orwell’s Garden cowl by Julie Cameron Gray is lovely by itself — a sock yarn cowl worked in the round, covered with dainty flowers.
But the story behind the cowl gives it a deeper meaning and give us something to think about while we’re knitting. It’s about creating things that last, through the lens of gardening, but knitting is similar in that we make things and we don’t know who might enjoy them in the future, what might happen to them when we’re gone.
And if you’re not into the deep introspection right now, you can just scroll through like you do on those recipe posts.
The cowl uses four colors and the colorwork is presented in a chart. It’s not difficult if you know how to read a chart, but it might be more efficient to do the yellow stitches at the center of each flower in duplicate stitch (or even as a French knot to add some texture) rather than knitting a single stitch of that color in each flower. Grab the free pattern from Taddle Creek.
[Photo: Guy Crawford.]
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