Do you know what can be just as fun as creating brand new knitting designs? Revisiting old designs and making them new again! Although every year I’m always developing new designs, I’ve made sure to also include revamping older designs as well, for lots of different reasons. Reason such as: making sure the pattern writing style is up to my current standards, utilizing yarns that are more readily available now or that I think will work even better, or creating new tutorials that will help encourage you and grow your knitting skillset. Today I’m excited to tell you about one of these older designs that I just recently revamped and republished – the Gray Street cowl!
The original design
When I first designed this cowl, I was working at a yarn shop and the prior year had noticed that so many customers were looking for simple, fun gift-making ideas around the holidays. Or, something simple they could purchase for a knitter in their life as a holiday gift. So the next year I wanted to create something that checked all of these boxes:
- Simple but still kind of interesting (but not so interesting that you couldn’t work on it while watching TV or a movie!). I chose a twisted 1×1 rib stitch pattern – it creates a more distinguished, interesting rib pattern, but still easy to do once you get the hang of it.
- Relatively quick to knit (in case you were doing some last-minute holiday knitting). So I chose a bulky-weight yarn.
- Multi-color so you would only need 1 skein of each color (making it a great stash-busting project too!)
At the time, we had a lot of customers looking to make gifts for their teenagers or 20-something family members who all requested neutral colorways. And so I decided to focus on 3 neutral colors for my sample. So the combination of my chosen color palette along with the fact that the stitch pattern created very defined lines, inspired me to call it Gray Street. Below is a picture of the original, from almost a decade ago:
After such a long time though, I really wanted to revamp this design a bit. The original yarn was a bit unique (in-between a regular bulky and a super-bulky) and was hard to substitute for, so I wanted to re-knit it in a more classic bulky/chunky weight yarn. And, because of the nature of the stitch pattern, I wanted a yarn that really showed off the stitch definition a bit more. And of course a yarn that had LOTS of color options so that if you wanted to go down “Gray Street” you could, but you could also instead choose “Green Street”, “Blue Street” – any colorful route you want!
The NEW Gray Street
Introducing the new Gray Street cowl, knit up in Ewe Ewe Yarn’s Baa Baa Bulky – a colorful, bouncy and fun bulky-weight.
And in addition to rewriting the pattern to work with this classic bulky/chunky-weight, I’ve created 2 size options to pick from – a 3-color long, infinity-style (that you can wrap around your neck twice), or a short 2-color style. Below you’ll see I did the gray version and the green version in the long-style and the orange version in the short-style.
Yarn Kits are Available!
If you’d like to make your own Gray Street (or any color street!) out of the exact same yarn I used, Heather of Ewe Ewe Yarns has put together some fabulous color combos as yarn kits on her website. It would also make a great knitting gift for the knitter in your life! One yarn kit will make either 1 infinity-style cowl or 2 short-style cowls.
Note: Yarn kits don’t include the pattern PDF – you’ll need to purchase the pattern separately.
New Tutorials
I wanted to make sure that this pattern would be very approachable for all knitting levels. So even if you consider yourself a more beginner knitter, you can do this! So to help with this, I’ve created a new Gray Street Cowl Tips Page (link in pattern) that provides tutorials for every aspect of this project, including 2 brand new short video tutorials that guide you through how to work the twisted rib stitch pattern and how I like to join a new color. I’ve also linked to those new videos below:
If you’re interested in the pattern, click here for the Gray Street Cowl pattern page on Ravelry!