My recent mini vacation was especially nice because we had no plans. We had no schedule to keep—no outings, no theme park, nothing. It made it easy to fit in naps for everyone—including mommy! It also made it easy for this mommy to find time to make a couple of little projects in the yarn world. My first project went together so fast I was able to spend the rest of my time working on another little project (I’ll share that one later). This super fast project is a knitted cowl in a seed stitch that started with a pattern from Close Knit Portland.

Some of you may be thinking, hey girl, it’s April. Do you really need a cowl? It’s been a warm winter after all, and maybe you should have put this project off until maybe October. But I’ve been looking at the weather, and Wednesday and Thursday night it is supposed to be down in the 30’s!! It makes me glad that I took a few hours to make this cowl. This project literally took 4 hours to knit. Promise! So if you have some chunky yarn in your stash, and you’re looking at a little cold snap like I am, maybe you’d like to grab some large needles and get to work on this project tonight! Your neck will thank you.

I promise this pattern is super easy. Do you know how to knit in the round? Can you knit and purl? Then you can do this project. The chunky yarn means that it doesn’t take long at all. Like, I said, I literally knitted this project in about 4 hours. The yarn I used was this one:

The folks at Close Knit Portland recommend Brown Sheep Burly Spun or Cascade Magnum. My thought is that you can pick your favorite chunky or super chunky yarn.

So, here’s my interpretation of the pattern: Cast on 65 stitches onto size 17 circular needles. When you join in the round—twist once. You know, it’s that twist that you work so hard to avoid normally when you knit in the round. You can actually knit this twisted or untwisted, but I took Close Knit’s advice and went with the twisted version. This is the pattern: knit 1, purl 1. Repeat. If you counted right, when you come around to the beginning on the next row you will knit your purls and purl your knits of the row before, creating the seed stitch. Do this for the entire skein. The pattern calls for 10 inches. I didn’t follow the pattern there; I think I ended up with about 8 inches. It’s big enough for me. Cast off. They didn’t specify in the pattern so I cast off in pattern—knit cast off where there was a purl in the row before, and vice versa. That’s it. Promise. Thanks to Close Knit Portland for an awesome pattern—I only tweaked it slightly!

Sometimes I link up at the following places: Friday Food at MomTrends, Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays at Simply Sugar and Gluten Free, Hooking up with House of Hepworths, The Finer Things and I Dream of Clean’s Spring Cleaning Challenge, The King's Court IV's What's Cooking Wednesdays and Organizing Junkie's Menu Planning Monday.