Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, are used to make our lives easier. One of the most important concepts is gears and gear ratios. If your gear ratios are off, your clocks will be off, your bike won’t get you up the hill, and your yarn winder won’t make pretty caked skeins.

Using slipped stitches, this cowl is designed to resemble interlocking gear teeth. And using different ratios of row counts, you can alter your “gear ratios” for different sized gears to make this cowl customizable.

I used a custom dyed skein of yarn that was 1/3 blue and 2/3 a red gradient. This resembles a failure analysis, typically used in engineering design, to show stress and strain, with red usually being areas of extreme stress.

Written for one size (10” tall and 28” around) but easily customizable to different sizes and yarn weights.

Great stash busting project, use some of those partials up, or that skein that you had to buy to finish a project but only needed a few yards.

Color 1 (Blue/small gear) approximately 75 yards
Color 2 (Red/big gear) approximately 160 yards
Note: This is for the 2:1 gear ratio size. If using a 1:1 gear ratio size, equal amounts of both colors will be needed.