Let’s scale up a sock pattern! A while back I was looking for a spooky colorwork cowl pattern and was having a hard time finding one. I did however find lots of sock patterns I liked so I decided to scale it up and use it for a cowl. I’ve been slowly working on it with hopes of being able to use it for this winter.
Unfortunately, the area I live in was decimated by Hurricane Helene back on September 27th, 2024. The college I am attending was shut down for 4 weeks. I was without power for 10 days and lost Internet for 23 days. This did give me a little time to work on finishing up this project though.
Materials and Scale up Process
This is made from a 100% wool single ply roving. I used Joanns K&C brand for this as they were on sale at the time but really any bulky (5) yarn should work. The pattern is actually a free one for socks I found on Ravelry. The color-work is written as a top-down design, so it was easy to translate over into bulky yarn for a cowl. Only issue I ran into was the jogging that occurs when the new row starts. With the bulky yarn, I would suggest catching floats more often than you normally would. I tried to make 4 stitches be the longest without catching.
Pattern after scaling up
The chart as written is a 10 stitch, 20 row repeat. I had to play around with swatching a bit to get it to be a size I liked but ultimately, I came up with:
- CO 90 with size 9US/5.5mm circulars using a long-tail cast on
- Rows 1-7: K1, P1
- Row 8: K all
- Switch to size 11US/8.0mm circulars
- Row 9: Begin chart as written
- I only did the chart 1 and half times to get the three rows but this is up to you.
- When done with the charted pattern, switch back over to size 9US/5.5mm circulars and repeat Rows 1-7.
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Use a stretchy bind off. I came across a sewn latvian bind off last year and have been using it a lot.