All Cowls, All the Time

And here's Idlewood:



Except for lengthening the sleeves, I basically followed the pattern as written--I may also have worked a few more hip increases than called for, since I'm kind of pear-y.

There's a lot of cowl:



If I were holding my head fully upright, and had gotten the cowl entirely unrolled, my head would be completely covered. I was worry about the rolling in theory (although not till it was too late to widen the garter stitch border, of course), but it turns out that I like it in practice. And it helps that I still think all of my handspun is the most beautiful yarn in the world, no matter how wonky it really it.

I lied--it's not all cowls, all the time--I'm making another pair of socks:



The Angee Socks from Sock Innovation. Since taking the picture, I've finished this one, and knit about 5 rows on sock 2. I'm really enjoying the stitch pattern--for the first rep, I checked the chart every pattern row, but now I've internalized it enough that I only need to peek at it occassionally, to be sure things haven't derailed.

There's one correction to the leg chart listed on the publisher's website, but I think there's actually another typo that hasn't been corrected--an ssk that should be a k2tog, or vice versa. I haven't read through the comments on Ravelry to see if anyone else thinks so--I'm just working it the way I think it should be, and it's working out fine.

Despite this, I am showing some personal growth in the area of following directions rather than doing it my way no matter what. The reason I noticed the first error (and the possible second error, for that matter) is that the stitch pattern is charted out three times--the transition from ribs to pattern, then separately for the leg and the foot--and the stitches in question should be the same in all three charts, but aren't. When I noticed the first difference between the charts, I compared them and picked the one that seemed most logical to me--which turned out not to be what the corrected chart said. It was a moment of high drama--would I follow the corrected chart? Would I do my own thing? Would following one direction I disagreed with make up for a lifetime of only following directions that I thought were right? Would anyone even notice the difference between right- and left-slanting decreases on a sock?

Or maybe i haven't grown that much... it doesn't show much improvement in ability to follow directions that conflict with the way you would have done it, if you only follow them when you think it won't show, does it?