Paper Tiger

I’m so pleased to have new work to share today! While I think I had at least one new pattern per year during my PhD, much of that was work for Amirisu or other publications, and the last time I published a new Paper Tiger pattern was December 2020. Now that I have the opportunity to come back to things that have been on the back burner, I anticipate you’ll see more new work here in the coming months! Today I’m happy to share the pattern for my Wandrian cowl (previously seen on the blog as a project here).

Wandrian uses one of my favorite construction methods: namely, a cowl knit in the round and then grafted together, like an innertube, so that there are no exposed wrong sides. These are especially useful for cold climates where a double-thick scarf is needed to keep the chill out, but the cowl construction means there are no scarf ends getting in the way or flapping around if you’re a winter cyclist, for example. Unlike some of my previous patterns making use of this construction, Wandrian is a single loop, but it would be very easy to simply knit it longer (assuming you have enough yarn) before grafting the ends together if you prefer a double loop (like I used for Pine Bough Cowl, Inkling, Hoquiam, and Marchmont).

The main reason this design is a single loop is that it began its life as a leftovers project. I used four colors of Marina Skua Mendip DK which were leftover from knitting my Vellum cardigan by Karie Westermann. That is also what gave rise to the transition from colorwork to stripes, since I ran out of the teal before completing a second repeat of the colorwork chart. That’s a feature I probably wouldn’t have come up with without the creative constraint of using leftovers, and that’s something I’d like to explore further in the coming year.

I will be sharing more about the name, Wandrian, as well as some more background and some reading recommendations in subsequent posts this week. Wandrian is available on Ravelry here and on Lovecrafts here. (A quick side note that I am planning to move away from Lovecrafts, but I’m currently still looking into options for alternative platforms. If you’re a designer who has thoughts to share on that, do get in touch.)