Twenty, twenty, twentyfour hours to gooooo

As is my penchant I gave this new pattern a ridiculous name.

I Can’t Control My Fingers

Often it is a song that comes on when I am knitting a pattern that clicks for some reason and becomes the name. You can probably count on this happening often for the foreseeable future. Hey, it is as good as using road names or cocktails, eh?

Some kind of Wonder Twins thing going on here I guess?

I get to say some things about this new pattern that you don’t often hear around these parts. The deeply textured pattern that I developed for these mitts is a fairly simple combination of knits and purls. It repeats over 16 rows and is easy to work. You could bust these mitts out quickly over a few days. Heck, you can knit these while watching TV.

To be completely honest, except for the thumb instructions I knit the second pair without even looking at the pattern. The red ones were the second pair. I had to do the red ones because a) I kept coming up with other ways that the mitt would be awesome and b) I needed a gift for my son’s 1st grade teacher. Yay for multi-tasking.

You can really see the thumb gusset here.

The way the mitts are constructed makes them easily amenable to modification. Want them snugger? Take out stitches in increments of 4. Want them shorter? Leave off some repeats.  Want them longer? Add repeats. Want them stripy or color-block? Add some yarn. These even work well with variegated yarn (but not crazy variegated). You can make them yours and then make another pair that is totally someone else (or your alter ego).

Let me talk a moment about the yarn I chose for these mitts. The orange mitts specifically. The Pumpkin mitts. Swans Island Organic Washable. It is a DK weight yarn that was made using an ecologically friendly method of super-wash to create an organic super-wash. This yarn guys? It is luscious. In addition to being a friendly super-wash process on organic wool, Swans Island also chooses to use only natural dyes. I might have a bit of a crush on this company. And I want to be straight, I bought this yarn, Swans Island doesn’t know I exist but I am glad they make their yarn.

And the reveal of the teaser

To be honest, the yarn for the red pair came out of my stash. It was a beautiful skein of Squoosh Fiber Arts Ultra DK in Blood Orange. Luckily this serves to illustrate that you can easily substitute yarn for this pattern. If you want a smaller mitt go with some sport weight (I had a tester use Bugga! with excellent results). The Squoosh resulted in a wonderfully squooshy mitt (quell surprise).

All in all I think this is a fun little pattern, check it out on Ravelry or Craftsy. As you can see I also had some fun with the pictures. Hey man, I have chickens and I am not afraid to use them.

What a coinkydink!

Hot on the heels of last week’s post concerning lifted stitches I opened up the new patterns on Ravelry and what did I see?

Mackinac Mitts by earthchicknits

Look at those wee little butterflies. You know how those are made? Lifted stitches! I asked the awesome earthchicknits if I could show these puppies off on my blog and she gave me permission to use her lovely photographs.

If you are looking to try out the lifted stitch technique I illustrated in this previous post on a somewhat smaller scale than the Roller Coaster Cowl then these just might be the ticket.

All the way round, just like I like patterns.

As with my TumpedDuck pseudonym, earthchicknits is actually the talented Stacey Simpson Duke, an independent knitwear designer who seems to share my proclivity towards accessories. Although it appears she has a better relationship with socks than I do.

Yeah, still haven’t finished that pair of stocks I started in mumble, mumble February mumble, mumble.

Her name above links to her Ravelry store where you can find these fun mitts should you be so inclined. I just thought it was a serendipitous for me to see them right after writing my post – so hey, when the universe tells you to do something, it is a good idea to listen, n’est-ce pas?

Swap yarn

I have an awesome group of knitters that I meet with every Friday night. We meet at an awesome Korean bakery that stays open until midnight on Friday night, so we are there knitting from about 8 until they kick us out. We spend most of Friday afternoon haggling on Ravelry about where we will go to eat before we meet for the knitting. The whole shebang is pretty fun.

The one “thing” that we do each year is a Gift swap. Now, we are completely aware that most of our members have holiday gift knitting to do for their family, so a work-around was developed (before I joined). It is  a secret swap so the names are drawn about a month before the holidays to get us into the spirit, but the actual swap takes place some time around Valentine’s day.

See, no stress.

This year my secret swapper got me a beautiful skein of Skein. A yarn I have been coveting for quite some time. So when I was trying to decide what fun-and-for-me knitting I was going to take on my stay-cation it was an obvious choice.

Let me tell you, it is luscious.

The second decision was what to knit. Towards the end of last month the talented Thea Coleman of BabyCocktails released a new e-book called With A Splash Of … which I found it necessary to buy immediately. I love small, fun accessory projects and this collection totally fit that bill. And, y’all might have noticed, I have an inordinate fondness for ellipses…

Isn’t she loverly?

End result of all of these shenanigans is that my “carry around” project for DragonCon was a pair of cashmere fingerless mitts. And I even finished the first one! The name of the pattern is Chamomile and you can knit it with worsted or with fingering held double. Obviously I am doing the latter.

I have knit with yarn held double but never like this. Previously I would carry a thin strand of something fancy to dress up something chunkier. With this I am working from the outside/inside of the same ball, it solely serves to provide a thicker yarn.

The color is as soft as the yarn.

But it works. The resulting fabric is subtly different than if I were knitting with worsted and the mixing of the two hand-painted strands of yarn provides a deeply complex color palate.  And I have a metric butt-tonne of fingering weight yarn. There is a very high possibility I will further explore this idea.

But now it is back to “work” knitting. I am hoping to find the time to finish the second mitt. Of all of the knitwear that I have, the fingerless mitt is the thing that I wear most frequently once it starts getting chilly. One is not particularly useful. Once you get the hang of the twisted cables and one slightly fiddly element of the pattern it is pretty much smooth sailing.

You know I can’t resist one last picture

All in all, love the yarn, love the mitt A++ would (and will) knit again!

What is your go to carry-around knitting?

 

Curiouser Mitts

Let’s talk about fingerless mitts. I am a huge fan of fingerless mitts, the one pair that I have made for myself is probably my most worn knitted item. They are imminently practical and are usually fun, quick knits. You can easily get a pair out of most any single skeins of yarn or partial balls you have left laying around.

Easy and fun, but there are things about some of the available patterns that I do not care for – and please know that these are just my personal preferences and not meant to cast aspersions on the design choices of anyone else.

1) I love the look of “reflected” mitts. Where there is a distinct left and rightness to the hands. Unfortunately this usually means that you have two sets of instructions for the two mitts – which makes the knitting process less fun and easy. Then, once they are made you have to make sure you get the right one on the right hand.

2) Picking up the thumb. While I do not care for the “hole to stick your thumb out of” method of creating thumbs (vastly preferring a gusset) I also do not like transferring the thumb stitches to waste yarn, picking up the stitches later and then knitting the 4 – 5 rows of both thumbs creating thusly four new ends to weave in.

3) One size fits all – but mostly all women who have relatively small hands.

So, obviously when I set out to make a pair of mitts to match …and Curiouser, I had an agenda.

Curiouser Mitts – one skein of Finito

I used a gusset, but worked it up to the point where it covered enough of the thumb to get away with simply binding off – it does not provide full thumb coverage, but you can always transfer to waste yarn and add your own thumbs if that is what floats your boat.

See the thumbs? No extra ends to weave in!

The pattern as written is designed for a medium hand with instructions to make it smaller for the petite and larger for, well, the larger. 😉 I like a little positive ease in my mitts – so these fit me perfectly. My husband has long thin hands and they fit him also.

Somehow these are pretty darn unisex

For the reflected patterning – I TOTALLY CHEATED. If you look carefully you will see I lifted the lace, cable and seed stitch patterning out of the shawl to make the pieces match, but it is the positioning of the elements that is the cheating. The cable is situated directly opposite of the thumb gusset with a stockinette/seed stitch gap separating the two. When you put the mitts on you instinctively scootch the thumb around so it is offset towards your palm. This rotates the cable around to the pinky edge of the back of your hand providing the illusion of reflected patterning without any reversing of the shaping or fiddling with the position of the thumb.

And, when you put them on it doesn’t matter which hand they go on. In my wacky brain I think of them as ambihandrous. 

As with …and Curiouser the original mitts were made with one skein of Malabrigo Finito worked at a fairly loose gauge. With these mitts it makes a big difference on the softness, but it also creates a situation where if you use a tightly spun sock weight yarn you will end up with a rather holey looking fabric. Now, if you have small hands you can simply go down needle sizes until you are happy  –  you will simply have smaller mitts. But if you are looking to keep the size (or even size up a bit) it will be better to substitute a Sport weight yarn.

Working on the Iphone, a perfect application for fingerless mitts

The mitts pictured that I made for my husband had just such a substitution. I had a partial skein of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz Bugga! left over from another project and I used that at the same gauge. It worked beautifully. Unfortunately the colorway has been retired – but if you really like these, the lovely dyer of Cephalapod Yarns has been known to resurrect colorways if she receives enough requests.

So – are you going to make a pair for the man in your life or for yourself? (I am aware that there is a distinct possibility that the man in your life is yourself – rock on guy knitters!)