FO: Loopy Cowl

One of my goals for this year is to experiment with arm knitting. Yeah, it's faddy and hipstery. But I saw this video from Red Heart and I thought, "Well, that scarf looks very clever. Doesn't it?" and "Hey, that's kinda cool to make a scarf in five minutes."

Now, Mikey uses Red Heart Fizzle in his video, but I used Swerve in Barbados, which I like the look of a little better. So I tried arm knitting it, according the video. It's an easy technique, and knits really fast, that's for sure. This probably really would make a scarf in about five minutes, once you got the hang of it. The problem is, I didn't really like the way this turned out.


The stitches are just so loose and enlongated. (And, you know, I don't think it's because I have abnormally large arms or anything. I don't, just so you know.) It just seems so much less like a scarf and more like just wrapping loops of yarn around your neck.

So I frogged it out and tried it with some #35 needles.

But this yarn is too much, even for needles that size. It just looks like a big bunch of knotted blech. So I ripped that one out, too.

The pattern on the label of the Swerve (and there's a video on Youtube for it, too) tells you how to finger loop it. You're basically chaining it with your fingers. But that seems like it would have the same issue as the arm knitting. So I picked up my #50s. And that, my dear Goldilocks, turned out to be just right.

I know this needle looks like the white 35, but it actually is the grey 50. Trust me.

I cast on three stitches and just worked garter stitch until the yarn ran out. There's about 11 yards in a skein, so it goes pretty quickly. I ended up with a pretty short scarf. I probably could've used another skein of this if I'd wanted to do a long scarf. But, intead of a long scarf, I just seamed both ends together and made a cowl out of it.

I like the look of this. I like the color, the texture, the size, and shape of it. And, it took about 20 minutes to knit, once I cast on to the 50s.