The Dissent Cowl

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news of RBG’s passing.  Even in her last moments, she was thinking of others saying, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” 

Yeah, that’s a lot to unpack.  Whole books will be written about it, I’m sure.  I’ll just cut to the chase and say:  Votes matter.  Election season has started. Don’t wait until November 3rd, the last day to vote.  Check out early voting in your area and do it.  It’s important and as we’ve seen time and again, we can’t count on Congress to save us. 

Now, I’ll put my soap box away and do some knitting.  As you can imagine, my daily knitting meditations are more important now, than ever.  I’m getting up earlier in the morning to squeeze a few rows in before work.  I’m trying to get back in the habit of lunchtime knitting.  There’s always evening knitting.  It’s not just any knitting though.  It’s gotta be something soothing, a repetitive pattern, colors I like, special yarns…the works.  I’m all in on the comfort knitting these days. 

I’ve got a whole basket of WIPs and recent FOs, thanks due to these redoubled bouts of comfort knitting.  It also means, I need to keep starting new projects too.  Enter the Dissent Cowl by Carissa Browning.  

It’s just the thing for this moment.  I tried to incorporate an RBG collar into a sweater early last year.  There was too much going on though, the sweater happened but it never got the collar.  This cowl is the perfect antidote to that.  I’m looking forward to having a little RBG themed meditation each day, as I work on this.  

I’m sure I won’t be the only one.  The designer is donated 100% of the sales from the pattern to the ACLU.  She’ll be doing that through the election.  In the last 24 hours, over 2000 knitters have bought the pattern, sending $10k to the ACLU.  That’s a lot of people spending a lot of hours knitting and thinking about RBG and what her legacy means.  That can’t be a bad thing.  

I’ve picked my yarns…a quite opposite pair. Much like RBG and conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, I think they’re going to get on famously. The solid purple is an amazing, squishy, lofty, woolen spun yarn, grown, milled and dyed in the USA. It’s 100% merino, from the Pacifica Coastside Collection at The Royal Bee. The variegated yarn, Miss Babs Kaweah, is a dense worsted spun yarn in the limited edition Rhinebeck 2016 color. I’ve been holding onto it for something ‘special’. Turns out, this is it!

I love the way the swatch worked up. The variegated yarn works perfectly as the jewels! And, don’t worry about doing complicated colorwork. This is is a simple slip stitch pattern. You only ever work one color at a time. It’s divine in it’s simplicity. You really get a lot of bang for your buck with this pattern. It looks more complicated than it actually is. Who doesn’t love that?

Is anyone else joining this impromptu knit-along? I’m sure #dissentcowl is going to become quite popular in the coming months. There’s also a crochet version, if you’d prefer. So go check it out, stash dive and join in! Channeling all this energy into slow fashion, can only help.