So, as I’ve mentioned before that I have an incredible amount of lace weight yarn just lurking around in the shadows of my yarn stash. Everyone else in the office seems to have learned their lesson (aka that they just won’t ever get around to knitting with lace weight yarn) so they steer well clear of it whenever a stray skein winds up in the office. I, on the other hand am more than happy to snap each and every one of them up and take them home with me. Well… almost anything, and by anything I mean just the blues!

This means that I’m always prowling Ravelry, our own pattern section and all the available books in the office for lace weight patterns. ANYTHING to put this lovely, light yarn to good use. Eventually I found A. Westbrook’s free crochet Lacy Feather and Fan pattern on Ravelry. I loved how open the pattern was, the simple two-row repeat and that I could really easily turn this into a cowl. SOLD!

I grabbed the nearest skein which wound up being an older Shadow Lace color (Jazz) and my size 4 (G) hook. A month of pretty sporadic work later I had one of the prettiest, breeziest cowls I’ve ever seen! I LOVE the pattern and how quickly I was able to use up an entire skein! Plus, the slightly denser fabric inherent to crochet means that the project actually winds up feeling like it’s done in a fingering weight yarn. I also mistakenly worked the entire project in DC where I should have done TC which means that the fabric didn’t wind up being as open as it was meant to be, but I really love how it turned out, perhaps even more than I would have if I’d caught my mistake earlier.

I have a few more skeins of lace in my stash and I was thinking about trying this pattern out with alternating colors every two rows. I can’t wait to wear it this summer once the sun goes down.