Handmade knit cowl

I'm not 100% sure when I became a knitter, but it was sometime in the past two months. I was bored, unemployed, and, looking for a hobby that would keep my hands occupied on some upcoming long car rides, stumbled upon kitting. Specifically, I wandered into Bryant Park Knits, a weekly knitting circle sponsored by Knitty City and held in New York's Bryant Park. Every Tuesday in the summer, employees of Knitty City gather in a corner of the park and provide free knitting lessons to any interested parties. For an hour and a half, they give people the use of their yarn, needles, and instructors - but the catch is that everyone works on small squares that are later sewn together and into large blankets that eventually get donated to homeless shelters. Free knitting lessons? Donating my time and talents to make blankets for homeless babies? I'm so there.

I got the hang of knitting pretty quickly (although pearling is a whole other beast that I'm going to try to tackle in my next project), and almost immediately headed to Michael's to buy my own needles and yarn. It wasn't too much longer until I had the beginnings of a cowl; a couple lengthy and dedicated knitting sessions soon created a rectangle of fabric that was of desirable dimensions. The near-finished cowl sat rolled up for a week or so while I hightailed it to Chicago for some friends, family, and hotdogs, but after sifting through my old button collection that is collecting dust in my parent's basement, I managed to procure some buttons that I knew would be the finishing touch to my scarf. One laborious button-sewing session later, et voilà! I am now the proud owner of one very unique, handmaid, dark grey, two-buttoned cowl.

Just to be clear, this is NOT a how-to post about how to knit your own cowl. I'm almost positive I didn't follow all the rules of perfect knitting, I'm absolutely positive I didn't follow a pattern, and I don't actually know if I could repeat my process to make an identical second cowl. However, I couldn't have done this without the advent of YouTube and the following instructional videos: binding off, making button holes, and adding a button - so thank you interwebs, thank you Knitty City, and thank you blog readers (all three of you!) for letting me blab on about my silly knitting project ;)