Check off: Moebius knitting

Finally, a post about something I managed to learn how to do. Moebius knitting is the ingenious technique of making a knit-in-the-round Moebius strip. Cat Bordhi's got the awesome instruction videos and books. The basics can be found in her video here, on YouTube:

Moebius cowls were all the rage a few years ago, but at that point, I was a new-ish knitter and had many other things I wanted to learn. I decided the technique would keep. And it has.

When E. was born, a friend gave me a skein of yarn that she told me I had to use to make something for myself. It's gorgeous yarn, from Sweet Fiber. Melissa does beautiful yarn. It's just a skein of her Merino Twist in worsted weight, but the colour is deep and saturated, with enough variation in the shade to provide interest without being distracting. The colourway name is "Temperate" and it's one of my favourite shades of green.

So I wound my yarn into a ball and went out to Valley Yarn and picked up a set of knitting needles in a length appropriate for Moebius knitting. I cast on the night before we left for the Christmas holidays so I would have something to work on in the car. I used a pattern that involved ribbing and a picot bind-off, titled Sprong Moebius.

All in all, it went well. I think I miscounted my cast-on stitches, so there's a section where the two-by-two ribbing is actually four by two, but it's just one section of four stitches, so it's easily ignored. I am not a perfectionist (though I was, a bit, as a child).

There is something very remarkable about watching one of these take shape. A Moebius cowl is knit from the centre out, so each Moebius round is the equivalent of two rounds on a conventional cowl. It feels as though it's knitting up faster that way.

I want to do another one, but what I want this time is a stockinette cowl with a garter stitch lace edging. I'm plotting out the lace right now and figuring out what it'll look like. Should it turn out well, I'll post it on Ravelry as a pattern.