Cowltopus Mystery KAL Clues 1 & 2

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! It's hard to believe that we are in mid-October. We are still having warm, dry days. We haven't had any precipitation since our first "snow" a couple of weeks ago. We are so lucky that we haven't had a fire yet! And my well has been stressed for the last couple of weeks so I have to be really careful with my water usage. But it sure does feel good!

Last week was my busy one. I've been joining more of the small groups with my quilt guilds and they all seem to meet around the same time. Last week I had the Longmont guild meeting on Tuesday, then the class from the Longmont speaker on Wednesday. I'll show what I did in class below. Thursday was the Quilts of Valor (QOV) small group, where we spend a day at the church sewing quilts for the QOV organization. Friday was the English Paper Piecing small group where we work on our own EPP projects. In this group, I just continued to work on my hexagon charm quilt. All of these were a lot of fun and Grace got to play with the other dogs at daycare so we were both tired at the end of the day.

Besides the quilt activities, I've spend most of my time since my last post working on Laura Nelkin's Cowltopus Mystery Knit-Along (MKAL) project. Laura likes to celebrate Cowltober with a new cowl pattern and has had a MKAL the last couple of years. This year's pattern is octopus-themed. Even though I have more than enough yarn in my stash, I bought this year's kit because I wanted the extras:

Cowltopus Kit Extras

I hope you can see in the picture that we got two stitch markers (a Sculpey octopus and a metal tentacle) and cute octopus end stoppers. The kit also came with a couple of cute stickers, but I really don't have anywhere to put stickers so I'll probably end up throwing them away. Laura loves to plan here MKALs with weird constructions so we really can't tell what the final project will look like. This year's is no disappointment! The first clue, which came out on October 4, had us use Judy's Magic Cast-on to create a two-sided piece, then we knit back and forth around it in a U-shape to make this:

Cowltopus Clue 1

I don't know if you can tell in the phots, but the bottom edge is a finished edge and the live stitches are in the U around the sides and top. From this angle it looks like we are knitting a jellyfish! The shaping looks like the top of a hood.

Cowltopus Clue 1

It's really had to show this shape in a picture! We got the second clue last Thursday and it continued the hood element:

Cowltopus Clue 2

In this photo, the live stitches are on the bottom and the finished edge is on the right side. Here it is standing up:

Cowltopus Clue 2

It's possible that this is really a snood, but I have a feeling that we are going to fold this in some strange manner and end up with cool-shaped cowl. We only have two clues left so we'll know soon!

As I mentioned above, I also attended the class offered by our quilt guild speaker. This class was on piecing circles using the Cut A Round ruler. If I was in the class to actually learn something, I would have been very disappointed because we basically just had a demonstration of the ruler and then spent the rest of the day (it was a full day class) piecing circles for a table runner. But I was really in the class to be more social so I was okay with that. We started out piecing a practice circle:

Circles Class Practice Circle

Then we worked on the table runner. The table runner was designed as three blocks with circles and then a border around it. But I don't use table runners and don't have any space for another wallhanging so I decided that I will end up making a lap or bed quilt instead and just concentrated on making blocks:

Pieced Circles Quilt Blocks

Since I love scrappy and Kaffe Fassett fabrics, I'll just keep making these blocks until I reach a size where I want to stop, then I'll sew them together and quilt it. I might do some hand embroidery in the solid fabric. I'll decide that later. This project will be set aside for a while since I have other things I need to work on right now, but should be quick to finish when I get back to it since the blocks are 14" square. And I'll probably piece the practice square into the quilt back to keep everything together.

Nancy