Poncho Villa

I'd never really thought of ponchos as something cool, but they recently started to seem cool since they are very "in" now in Istanbul. To me, a poncho was a transparent blue bag-like article of clothing given out for free on the Maid of the Mist boat trips at Niagara Falls. To see them here in all sorts of colours, materials and lengths showed me a whole other side of ponchos. Also, many of my girl pre-school students wear beautiful ponchos knit by the grandmothers, so I decided to look into knitting myself one.

I bought a huge skein of variegated blue and teal yarn when on holiday in Bodrum and thought this would be the perfect project to use it on. There are countless free poncho patterns online, but liked this one the best:

(full pattern here)

The problem was that I didn't have the right sized needles. I'd thought about actually going to the knitting shop and getting the right size, but the day I considered it was pissing down so I instead just added about 40 stitches and hoped it would be the right size (lazy, I know).

It ended up not really being big enough, but it still works. I added a string with pom-poms to spice it up a bit (I LOVE pom-poms). I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it because it long comes down to my elbows so it won't be warm enough to wear instead of a coat but when it's warm enough to not need a coat, the poncho will be unnecessary. But still. It's cute and it was good practice perfecting cables.