Happy Hookey Day- knit-lookalike-stitch cowl tute with links

Happy Day recently hooking a cowl out of some stash trial yarn from our recent Delft trip in October?!

I saw this fab pattern in #crochet 57 magazine or may have been #59, in Hobbycraft but it was £8 and I only liked the 1 pattern! And I have this resolution /promise NOT to buy anyomre magazines or paper patterns as I am bursting out of my workroom and and and I have so MANY already.

That's almost 10 years of obsessive crochet and crochet collecting for you!

I can;t believe how it's flown by, it seems only yesterday in 2005 when I took it up again?

Anyway don;t let me ramble on , with luck I found the SAME pattern FREE on Ravelry so here's the link with tutorial:

http://www.allaboutami.com/post/102338144071/tripleluxecowl

It's called the triple luxe cowl and I made mine from 2 balls of MEDIO lana grossa and did the start chain of 78 sts with a 15 mm hook, now a 12 would have been much better or even a 10 mm but I could not find those in a hurry so I winged it with a 15mm.

 Bit on the loose side, eh?

 Then you close it with a slip stitch and work a half treble all the way around. With a 9 mm hook.

 See? There I go...

 After that you either spiral or close each row and chain 2 to start again BUT the KEY thing is to work the half trebles in the back back loop! That is the loop you see if you tilt the V stitch top towards you... IT'S BEHIND YOU as they say in the pantomime. The link above shows it as a video really well I think. When you tilt the work you see a very small tight loop on the right and then a long diagonal loose loop to the left of the wee little one, THAT's the one you want, the long one.

 And that tilts the top row of work towards you which shows up like a line of V 's just like knitting?

 Here can you see the little loop of the next stitch to the left of the long loop that my red hook is into?
It's the LONG ones you want not those little ones.

 See? I am trying to show you? I am working a half treble so there's two loops already on the hook and I'm positioning my hook into the long loop at the back of the work.

 The back of this stitch is all curly wurly looking, cowl shows both in the photo below.

 End of ball 1, 9 rows completed.

 Also I used a RUSSIAN JOIN to start the new ball of yarn: I will demonstrate:

 Take both ends and curve around each other thus:

 Take one end into a darning needle and squiffle it into and inside the yarn going back on itself:

 Then pull that tight, can you see on the left I have done this now.

 Repeat on the right.

 Both ends done.

 Now trim with scissors the bits sticking out.

 VOILA now pull at it and use it to crochet onwards.

 The 2 ball cowl, 180 metres of chunky yarn.

 Because I had those supersized loopy chains at the start I needed to disguise them so I top or surface chained over them: thus

 With the hook above the work and working up and down tambour style you crochet along and over those manky chains.

 SEE?!!