Miriam and I want to honour and remember my mother by supporting Learning For Humanity and inviting many others to support it as well. We’ve decided that 100% of the money from pattern sales of The Secret Way of Patterns will go to support the installation of Learning For Humanity educational systems in schools in Zambia. Miriam is hoping that we could sell several thousand patterns (she’s hoping to raise enough to cover the costs of one school – I told her that we would need to sell 8,000 patterns to do that). Read the full blog post here.

Pattern is 6 pages.

My 7 year old niece Miriam wants to be a fashion designer (and the Prime Minister of Canada but that’s another story). She spends a great deal of time drawing outfits and has had very distinct opinions on fashion style for several years. I thought it would be a great activity for us to start designing knitting patterns together and Miriam agreed.

Early in 2016 we went out to a local coffee house to discuss what Miriam wanted for her cowl. She made some initial sketches and we went through one of my Japanese stitch pattern books together with Miriam marking down the number of the patterns she liked for about 20 pages before she got overwhelmed. She then narrowed the selection to 5 or 6 patterns and we discussed how she’d like the cowl knit.

Of course, she had very definite ideas about the direction the knitting should be done (along the length), the length of the cowl, how the patterns should go together (in bands), and the way the patterns should be repeated. She quickly narrowed down the smaller patterns to go between the larger motif but it took a bit of work before she finally managed to get it down to a final selection.

Miriam wanted her cowl knit in a cream colour, with large blue buttons so she could wear it multiple ways. The result is the shorter sample which she is modeling. The longer sample in green is the “adult” version and it is shown grafted together as an infinity cowl.

Miriam gave permission for her sketch and notes to be included here so that it could inspire other young designers.

This pattern is written in two sizes (short, long) and may be either grafted closed or worked with buttonholes.

Skills Required:

• Working with charts
• Provisional cast on
• Kitchener stitch
• Buttonholes
• Blocking

Finished size (blocked): 12”/30.48 cm wide by 42 (56)“/106.68 (142.24) cm long

Other Tools:

• Waste yarn and crochet hook, US H (5 mm)
• Buttons, 1 3/8”/35 mm (3), optional
• Glow line tape (to mark current row on charts/instructions)
• Tapestry needle
• Unwaxed dental floss (to attach buttons)
• Tpins

Skill Level: Advanced Beginner

Yarn: 436 (540) yards/ 400 (522) meters of a merino and cashmere blend worsted weight yarn that knits up to 4.5 sts/inch.

Shown In:
Green Sample (Long, Grafted): Indigodragonfly ‘MerGoat Worsted’, (180 yards/165 meters; 80% superwash merino, 10% cashmere, 10% nylon; 4.06 oz/115 grams per skein). 3 skeins in Straight Outta Swampton.

Cream Sample (Short, Buttons): Berroco ‘Vintage’, (217 yards/198 meters; 50% acrylic, 40% wool, 10% nylon; 3.53 oz/100 grams per skein). 2 skeins in 5101 Mochi and 3 buttons (1 3/8”/35 mm)

Errata:
October 19, 2016: There was an additional incorrect line of instructions in the written instructions for Chart C. The instructions “R3 & 11: P1, k2, yo, ssk, k2, p1, k2, k2tog, yo, k2” are incorrect and should not have been included in the instructions. Please ignore this line and download the corrected version of the pattern.