Whit's Knits: Mobius Cowl aka "Cowl with a Twist"
If you ever went to school, you probably at some point were asked to cut a strip of paper, to give it half a twist it and to tape the ends together. You were told, "This, class, is a Mobius Strip." I have never forgotten the shape, a beautifully turning loop with no apparent inside or outside, no beginning and no end.
For this fall we've designed this super snuggly Mobius Cowl who owes its elegance to the unique twist of the Mobius strip. We used Alchemy's Kozmos yarn which is a gorgeous blend of silk, mohair, wool and cotton. Each fiber absorbs the dye a little differently. The result is a complex play of color and texture, very soft, slightly fluffy and a little bit shiny.
It was so hard for us to choose just one colorway for our Mobius Cowl that we decided to show you all the runner ups! All the details for the the palette we chose and also the runner ups are given in the Mobius Cowl Project Journal (click here to see!).
For instructions on how to knit your own cowl please visit our Mobius Cowl Project Journal. Thanks! - Whitney
purl bee
Whoops! We can count rows and multiply stitches per inch, but apparently our math skills end there! Many people more informed than we have written to correct our notion of a Mobius Strip. It turns out that while this cowl may have the air of a Mobius Strip, it is not actually one. Instead of a half twist, our cowl has a whole twist in it and therefore lacks the main property of a Mobius Strip which is to have only one edge. If you're more mathematically precise than we are and would like to actually knit a Mobius Cowl, please see Cat Bordhi's Mobius Cast On at this link.
In light of all this new information, we have decided to rename our cowl and are now calling it the Cowl With a Twist. We are so sorry (and embarrassed!) to have misinformed you all! Forgive us!
Reader Comments (16)
To knit a true Mobius strip in one piece, you could use Cat Bordhi's Mobius cast on (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVnTda7F2V4) with the main color and then bind off with the contrast color.
You can't get a half-twist unless your knitting starts from the middle of the Mobius band, which is what Cat Bordhi's Mobius cast on does. In a half-twist band, there will be only one outer edge, so the stitches you knit form a continuous loop on "both sides" of the center cast on. Any conventional cast on will give you a starting edge and an ending bind-off edge, so you can only get a whole number of twists that way.
There are a couple of alternate Mobius knitting methods (as well as Bordhi's) on sarah-marie belcastro's page http://toroidalsnark.net/mkmb.html . The instructions are near the bottom of the page, after the history and math.
I knitted the cowl and could not understand what was wrong - untill I noticed that it had a whole twist. And the cowl does not fit nicely around the neck.
So - I'll start again - which is no problem.
This project is fast and fun :-))