When is a Flower Just Too Danged Much?

Last week, I wrapped up my first cowl of the season. After many hours of agonizing knitting, my hands were all cramped up and I found myself walking with a bit of a limp. I can't lift my left arm over my head without letting out a pathetic little whimper. I cry in my sleep.

For my next project, keeping in mind that the best I can do is a lopsided square or a rectangle, I decided to try another cowl. To mix things up, I switched to using the caramel colored alpaca that I've been spinning lately. And I switched from size 13 needles, which, I swear, seemed like knitting with pencils, to size 10 wooden needles. Wooden needles, it turns out, are much nicer than plastic ones, or, worse, metal ones. They're very comfortable. But I borrowed these from my Mom, so throughout my knitting, I had to keep reminding myself not to sit on her needles, as I've done in quite a few of her plastic ones that way, and she seems awfully partial to these wooden ones.

When I borrowed my Mom's knitting needles, she asked what pattern I was following for the cowls, and I had to laugh. "Pattern?", I scoffed. "I don't need no stinking pattern." Sadly, this is absolutely true. My goal when I knit is to consume precisely the quantity of yarn that I have in my hands, no more, no less. And, although I do have a book about knitting that offers up 250 different stitches, I'm still sitting here with the tried and true knitting and purling. And purling, my friends, is being saved for another day. Maybe the next cowl.

As a result of my rather limited repertoire, the cowls are coming out functional, but it's unlikely anyone will fall on the floor blessing my knitting skills. So I decided I needed to punch them up a bit. I found instructions to make felted flowers on the internet. Well, you can make them from store-bought felt, but that just wouldn't do. So I scrounged the thrift stores searching for feltable sweaters. Since I have an aversion to wool, I aimed high, looking for cashmere or angora. I found what I was looking for, and set to work.

Now it's your turn to judge:

I ran out of models

My husband tolerates way more abuse than I care to admit



So, my Mom likes the felted flowers, but she's worried they overpower the cowl. My husband says he likes the flowers. I made the felted flowers removable, with a pin, so that if it turns out my hapless recipients don't like the flowers, they can part with them. But what if they don't like the cowl?