I cannot escape the pull of the magical world… but then to be fair, I don’t really try 😉 To date I have designed two full length scarves based on the Harry Potter Universe, “Always…” and “The Magizoologist’s Menagerie”. So why not try something a little different?
I like stark silhouettes on cowls, I think they show up well and can be very striking. I love how the outline shows up on “Through the Stones” .
So I decided to try a similar setup for my next Harry Potter inspired design!
I took the iconic castle silhouette of Hogwarts and set it in black against an absolutely gorgeous blue sky (the colorway of the yarn is actually called “Brilliant Blue”!- how appropriate).
I decided to try something a little different this time by changing the contrast color for the last 15 or so rows of the cowl so that I could have the moon and clouds in a different color than the castle. I had to make sure that the castle ended on the row just before the moon and clouds began so that I could cleanly switch and never have more than two colors going at a time.
I also thought that it would be nice to have some topstitching in gold to highlight the castle’s windows and also to have stars in the night sky. I had attempted topstitching for the lamppost panes in the Narnia inspired “In the Land of Spare Oom” cowl but those stitches were all very close together and this time the stitches would be quite far apart. I ended up using a 4″ long tapestry needle so that I could more easily go from stitch to stitch. The difficult part was making sure that the gold thread stayed only between the two layers of knitting when travelling between two stitches with some distance between them, instead of popping through on the back.
I decided to name it the “Where’s my Owl?” cowl, in honor of those of us that are still searching the sky for our Hogwarts letter to arrive ♥
Overall I think the effect is quite nice and the cowl is much easier to wear on days when a scarf is just a bit too much 🙂
