I have been fascinated by the large cowls or tubular scarves everybody suddenly started wearing a couple of years ago. How do they work? Won’t the purl side show? It seemed to me most of the commercially available cowls were just scarves with their ends sewn together and with quite boring stitch patterns, so I started playing with stitches of my own.

I went with a quite familiar and simple lace stitch pattern and converted it into a reversible ribbed lace. The cowl is worked in the round, so you can finish whenever you get bored or run out of yarn, instead of having to knit on forever and ever as with a long scarf. This is a fine pattern to use one of those stray skeins of sock yarn!