Bimble noun/verb: to go for a short, leisurely walk in the outdoors. “I went for a bimble today”. This cowl is small and compact, perfect for bimbling out and about in the colder weather. It knits up quickly using only knit, purl and slipped stitches. It’s an ideal introduction to mosaic knitting when you only work with one strand of yarn at a time.
Make the bimble cowl your own
You may wish to use a different weight yarn, but still wish for the finished bimble cowl pattern to be the same size. This can be achieved by varying the number of times you repeat the motif. Whilst the table below is a suggestion for how to do this, I strongly recommend that you prepare a swatch in your chosen yarn. This will tell you exactly what size the motif will be, and you can use this to calculate your own stitch count and rows. I have not calculated yarn requirements for these suggestions, so please ensure that you have enough for any changes that you are planning.
Also, a note on the appearance of the cowl. As you use a smaller yarn, you need more stitches to create the same amount of fabric. This means that you will repeat the motif more times. Which, in turn, means that the overall proportion of the motif size to the finished cowl will change. The motif will look much smaller in relation to the cowl when knitted with 4 ply wool, than it will when knitted with chunky.
Yarn | Assumed tension (gauge) | Circumference | Depth | |||
| Sts/rows to 10cm (4 inches) in st-st | Needle size | No. of repeats of motifs | No. of stitches required | No. of repeats of motifs | No. of rounds worked (not including edging) |
4 ply (fingering) | 28/36 | 3.25mm (US3) | 6 | 168 | 4.5 | 126 |
DK (light worsted) | 22/30 | 4mm (US8) | 5 | 140 | 3.75 | 105 |
Aran (worsted) | 18/24 | 5mm (US6) | 4 | 112 | 3 | 84 |
Chunky (bulky) | 14/20 | 6mm (US4) | 3 | 84 | 2.5 | 70 |
Mosaic knitting worked flat
You may decide that you like the motif in the pattern, but that you would prefer to work flat. Either to later join the work with a seam, or because you would rather have a scarf than a cowl. This is possible, but the bimble cowl pattern uses the technique of mosaic knitting in the round and so the pattern will need adapting. I discuss ways of doing this in this blog post.
