Black Friday Fringe Cowl

Black Friday Afternoon Project

Well I went to JA for Black Friday this morning, spent 2 hours there and stocked up on some fabrics for some projects.  The cutting lines were a little ferocious as evidently the fleece was a ridiculous price and folks had about 10-15 bolts per cart to cut! I landed a good place on line, and it moved fairly well, the only trouble i ran into was that after that and shopping for notions, i remembered i needed the trim for these cowls, and had to select it and then get another number and at that time I hit a longer wait.  Oh well... no biggie... I knew I wanted to probably start one of these cowls today, so i stood and waited.

So my cowl is inspired by Sandra from my Stitcher's Guild forum.  Her blog post about it is Here.  It is from a Soho tutorial from The Purl Bee - Pom Pom Cowl. 

My taste wasn't pom-poms, so I searched the trim section at JA for something that I liked.  I found a few, but some were very expensive... Then I found this silky fringe, like from the roaring 20's.  I really like it, so I got Brown to go with the gold pinstriped Brown linen, shown below, Red to go with the black linen, and gold to go with the beige linen.  It came out better than hoped.  The look is exactly what I was going for, and it is so comfy!

I fell in love when I saw Sandra's cowl, thinking now this is the best alternative to those turtlenecks I always want to wear in the chilly weather... this really dresses things up and keeps me warm... total shout out to Sandra!  You'll see on her blog how she is a master adjuster of all things wearable!

Sewed this up in about an hour 1/2, maybe a little more because lining up that fringe was tricky.  Will post the other two when they are done.

 

November 28th,

 

Well I made my second Cowl, Black with Red fringe.  I took more pictures this time along the way.  I also improved my method from the first time by pressing the seams first, then pinning and stitching the fringe to the cowl.  Went much smoother that way.  Here is a little story of pictures...

 

 

First, I started a little before this clock picture, say 5 minutes earlier.

 

 

First thing I did was fold under and press my seams

 

 

This way I get to line up the ends to see if they line up ahead of time, which was something i didnt' do on my first cowl, and I had to ease the ends together, which wasn't a big deal, but i figured I'd improve on this the second go 'round.  These didn't line up, so I opened the seam a little and re-pressed.

 

Like so...

 

Now I could lay the trim easily in the channel, and pin it for stitching.

 

I had to make sure those little strands were all tucked on the right side and not interfering!

 

Side one stitched! Nice!

 

While stitching I had to keep a hand gently guiding the fringe out to the side so as not to "catch" any on the underside, which did happen a little anyway, but it was minimal, and easily fixable.

 

OOoops!  had a miss on the end here! didn't catch the tape :) 

 

Pull out my trusty seam ripper so I can re-stitch this boo-boo.

 

Okay all better!

 

Finishing up side two, now to stitch the two sides together, press seams open, stitch the open seams down, and we're done!

 

Now the fun part!  Pulling off the fringe-stay plastic which was attached to help keep the fringe together and manageable until the project is done. This was fun but as you can see left a bunch of little lint bunnies.

 

Wrapped this up in about 1 hour 15 minutes-ish

 

Cowl Number Two!

 

My third one is Cream with Gold fringe. I will just pin a pic when that's done.

 

Thanks again Sandy for the outstanding inspiration!