I wanted to make a cowl and bought one skein of Zitron Nimbus yarn and just started to crochet. It was fun for me to make the cowl and I want to share the "pattern" (or let's call it an instruction, it is not much design work in it) with you.

The cowl is very simple and can be even done in one evening. I am very pleased how it turned out:

Side note: I learned crochet at school, but forget most of it. I re-teached myself with videos from youtube. They were from the US, so I learned the US crochet terms. It was just later that I found out, that Americans and British people use different terms. So sorry to all the British out there: I am using US terms here.

If you want to do the “A Gambling Cowl” for yourself, follow these instructions:

Are you a role player? In this case you know the importance of dice. The dice will deceiced, if you will restore a lot of live points or few, if you hit the enemy with all your might or if you will fail, if you will climb over the fence or if you make a fool of yourself and trip over it…

Here the dice will deceiced what kind of stitch you will use for the next row of your cowl. You crochet till the cowl is the desired length - or you run out off yarn.

First you have to deceiced what the consequence of you throwing the dice will be.

My consequence were: 1,2 = sc 3,4 = hdc 5,6 = dc

Now you are set to start. I recommended to start the cowl with a foundation row (you can look up at photo tutorial here. (That’s the place there I learned to forget about base chains). That way you can estimate easily the fitting length. Join with a sl st to the round. Throw the dice and off you go!

I started this cowl with a hdc foundation row (the tutorial shows it with dc) land joined to the round as soon it was long enough to fit over my head (first try was 68 stitches, but that was too big. I frogged and started over with 64 stitches, which turned out to be fine!). Consider, that some yarn tend to stretch.

I grabed a dice and started crocheting. I come up with the following pattern:

01.row: Foundation row (hdc)
02.row: hdc
03.row: sc
04.row: dc
05.row: sc
06.row: dc
07.row: dc
08.row: sc
09.row: hdc
10.row: sc
11.row: hdc
12.row: sc
13.row: sc
14.row: hdc
15.row: dc

During the process I had the idea, that I could add some stitches, so that it will flare out a little bit at the end. That way it will cover the shoulder a little bit. That also means, that you wear it upside down (the begining is at the top, the flare-out end at your shoulders).

This part involved for me some weighting the yarn to make sure, that I will have enough yarn to finish the last round. It was still some yarn left so I made another row of sc. In the end I had 80 cm of yarn left.

16.row: #dc, 2dc in next dc# repeat till end of round 17.row: sc

Weave in ends - and stay warm with your new cowl!

By the way: Feel free to cheat with your rows, if you have the feeling, that you have too many/too few rows of a stitch - another stitch is more fitting - you are tired of a particular stitch - or whatever reason you can think of. Gambling includes cheating! Just don’t let your role game master catch you!