elizabeth_mn

Finished the second mitten yesterday.

I have a new yarn stranding doohickey. It is this coiled wire one. It is more comfortable than the other one, but a little harder to get the yarns in. I've found it's easiest to first join the yarns to the project for a couple stitches, then put the guide on and slide the yarns in. But it really helps when doing those little every-other-stitch patterns.

There are 7 colors in these mittens and the sections are so far apart I really couldn't carry colors up. So I was left with tons of ends to weave in.

I am pretty happy with my floats on the inside; they are loose enough that the mitten still stretches easily but not so loose they look sloppy. I was paying a lot of attention to keeping them loose as I went.

The Girl likes them!

These were fun, and I am glad I made a plain pair before the colorful one, to get the sizing, etc. I think now I am done with mittens for a while.

My Ravelry project for both of the recent pairs of mittens is here.

Finished this mitten last night.

It is brighter in real life. My tablet takes pretty washed out pictures.

I was surprised at the amount of grey in it. I was making it up as I went along, no real plan except the 7 colors F picked out. I just decided as I went that the colors would pop nicely on that light grey.

Now to make it a friend!

Crappy tablet picture.

Just making it up as I go along!

Well that was fun.

Now I want to make another pair in lots of wacky bright leftover scrap yarn.

So I finished a sweater today and couldn't bear going back to a ufo. I needed something instant. So, mittens for the kid.

Here is my crappy picture taken from the couch. Because sitting and not getting up.

I started these an hour ago and I am hoping to finish one before bed. I liked the plain brown for everyday plus Victorian. When this pair is done I might make a bright stripey one. Stash and leftover yarns only, of course.

Pattern is my usual favorite any-gauge mitten recipe. Ravelry project is here.

My knitted mittens from a couple years ago have completely deteriorated; I darned several holes and the other day I finally just gave up.

So I took a few minutes and made these!
043

Cut and sewn from old sweaters which I felted in the washing machine. I actually used the sleeves of the green striped one to make mittens for F a few years ago. The pattern was given to me by a Treadle customer a few months ago; I believe it was her own draft and she asked if anyone wanted a copy. (Of course we all did!)
042

Honestly, these were so easy and simple that it's actually pretty lame that I am giving them their own blog entry. But I love them!

I had a panicked few days as the snow first fell and I realized I didn't have any mittens for little F. Too late to knit some, at my glacial pace anyway. I went to about a billion stores and found nothing. Mittens for sizes 0-3 months were abundant, as well as 4T and up. But a 12 month size? Doesn't exist!

I went through about 3 pairs of failures and a far too expensive piece of organic cotton fleece (now in scraps in the trash) before giving up on a mitten with a thumb and trying some simpler ones in some old felted wool.

And here's a thing I have been yearning to say for many of my crafting years:

I made these out of an old sweater I felted in the washing machine.

Yay me for upcycling*!

I sewed a little elastic at the wrist, but otherwise they are pretty untampered-with sweater sleeve cuffs. I used a narrow zig-zag on the sewing machine since the serger was giving me crap, and I think I liked it better that way anyway because I got a narrower seam allowance.
( Progress veiw and a cute baby pic )

Made these yesterday. Trying to use up the last of the blue Malabrigo merino.

I used the cupcake mitten from Itty-Bitty Nursery as a guide for sizes. Since my yarn and gauge were different, I didn't follow the pattern, I just cast on 4" worth of stitches, ribbed for a while, stockinette-ed for a while, then decreased for a round top.

They are so simple that I think they almost don't merit their own entry, but I like them so much! Thumbless mittens always make me giggle a little.

Because I have two hands!

They fit really nicely and I think they look super cute. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 37 grams of leftover yarn.

Yay!

Finished this last night. I made lots of modifications to the pattern, Fittin Mittens, which is really only a sort of template anyway. I made the hand narrower as I went up, I shortened the ribbing, and I started the thumb gusset lower. Mostly, what I tried to do was make the mitten shaped more like my own hand. And it fits pretty well!

The greatest modification I made was changing the top from square to round. Using what I learned from this Knitty article about shaping sleeve caps, I rewrote the top decreases to blend the angles.

Square top, pointy top, round top.

The squared-top mitten is directly from the pattern and decreases 2 sts on each side every other round, then uses kitchener stitch to graft the top together. (My pink mitten, above, is old and cruddy. You can see the square top better in my red mitten.)

For the pointy-top mitten, I decreased 2 sts each side on every round, then k2tog all around on the last round.

For the round-top mitten I drew the curve I wanted, then broke that curve into straight segments to figure out how severely to decrease and where and for how long. I ended up decreasing as set in the pattern - 2 sts on each side - every other round for 3 cycles, then decreased as set every round for 3 rounds, then I k2tog all the way around for two rounds and threaded the yarn through the last few sts.

I like it and I'm eager to start the next one. Mittens are fun! I'm dreading the time when I can look in the closet and say to myself "Okay, I think I have enough mittens now."

I really wanted to include some cables on this, just for the fun of knitting them, but I decided that the varigated yarn would probably fight with them too much, so plain stockinette it is. I made the cuff on Saturday, and the cuff looked great, yay!

I started on the hand and I got huge ugly pooling in two places. It's the red; this yarn has long runs of red with much shorter runs of all the other colors (blue, purple, yellow, green, and the muddy in-between shades).

So I ripped it out and started the hand again. I began the thumb gusset increases sooner, both for fitting issues and to perhaps help distribute the colors better. Then, when it looked like a pool of red was forming, I broke the yarn to remove a small segment of red and started knitting again with another color. I did this three times. I don't like the idea of now having all those ends to deal with, but it's the only way I could figure out to manually control the pooling.

Now I'm liking it much better! The colors are way more blended.

This picture is crappy. It doesn't look like real life at all.

There is way to much blue here. The yellow is really much more orange-y golden (it looks almost white here), there is more green, and the whole effect is a much warmer tone. I tried to adjust the colors for a while, but I didn't want to put too much time into an in-progress picture anyway.

I'm anticipating having to manually adjust the colors a few more times as I go up the hand, but I hope it's not too many.

I finished knitting a little apple and a pear. I re-did the leaf about 5 times because the one in the pattern just didn't look right to me. Now I'm starting to have doubts about embroidering little happy faces on them. They look so cute the way they are! Besides, I already embroidered the apple once and ripped it out because it looked so crappy. I really don't think I am any good at embroidering faces onto knitting. I always try to make nice round eyes and they aways end up long and oval somehow. My faces never look as cute as the ones in the patterns.

To avoid thinking about those, I started a new pair of mittens. I bought some beautiful, wacky-multi-colored merino a couple years ago on a whim and I think it's just enough for a pair of mittens. I'm knitting them at 6.5 sts/inch on a sz. 5. I've just done about half the cuff now, but I have some vague plans to include some cabling to the back of the hand.

Ok, I know it's 2009 now, but I finished these yesterday in time to wear them to a NYE party.

They're a bit snug, but that's how I wanted them.

This is the first thing I've ever made with cables! Yay! And they're relatively symmetrical!

I knitted the thumb and wove in all the ends yesterday, which took a surprisingly short amount of time. (Surprising because I am usually slower.)

For the thumb, I decreased every row, without a row of plain knitting in between, for two rows, once I got to the decrease point, just like I did for the top of the hand. I was worried about not having enough yarn for the 2nd one, but I weighed the completed mitten and the remaining yarn on my postal scale and it seems like it will be fine.

Today I want to:

Cast on the 2nd mitten
Knit 10 more rows of sweater border
mend clothes
sew the fly zipper on the corduroys I'm making for the man
sew a new liner for my towel hamper

I'd better get moving!

I finished the hand of orange cabled mitten version 2.

Notes so I can make the next one symmetrical:

I didn't like the squared top of my last mittens, so instead of decreasing every other row and then grafting the top together, I started decreasing every row.

After I did the last cable twist, I placed my markers so I had 16 sts on the front and 14 on the palm. I decreased using a k2tog, (slip marker) k1, ssk on each side, until I had 10 stitches left, then I k2tog around the last row and threaded the yarn through the last 5 stitches.

The top is a bit pointy but I like it. Plus, it fits! Hooray!

I made this mitten.

Which would be great if the mitten actually, you know, fitted my hand.

( photos of the other side )

It's so tight and the stitches are so distorted when I try to pull it on. I probably should have ripped it out sooner but I was so in love with the way the cables were looking that I guess I ignored everything else!

I used a cable pattern from Super Stitches Knitting which I re-wrote the WS rows for to make it work circularly.

I wanted to make it tighter than my last pair because they are now so loose they almost fall off my hands. I also tried a new gauge swatch method for cicular knitting: wrapping the yarn around the back and knitting every row flat to approximate circular. Well, it truns out my gauge was 3.5 sts/ in on the swatch and 4 sts/ in in real life.

Also, when I knit on DPNs I get really bad laddering unless I pull the corners extra tight. With only 8 sts on each needle, that tightened up the gauge overall a bit. That plus the tightening effect of the cables = super tight crappy mitten.

I was angry for about 10 minutes about this, now I'm just disappointed, I'll need to rip the entire thing out and re-do it.

(Rationalizing my failure, now in convenient list form):

Lost:
10 hours
feeling in fingertips
confidence in gauge swatches

Gained:
knowledge that new gauge swatch method sucks
knowledge of how to convert a cable pattern from flat to circular knitting (a big deal, I think!)
insight as to how my gauge changes when knitting circularly
another reminder to check gauge often while knitting

I think after I rip it out I'll leave it for a while and work on my sweater for a week or two instead.

Wow, it's becoming "All Mittens, All The Time!" over here.

redmitten001.jpg red mitten 1 picture by ashamanjababu

I finished mitten no. 1 of the red pair for the man. It's a pretty bulky (3.5 sts/inch) merino wool from Cascade. He really likes the first mitten and I can't wait to begin the second!

I think I'm getting closer to figuring out the kitchener stitch. It still looks a little weird, but better than the pink mittens. And my cast-on edge is much neater and stretchier on these ones, too.

I have achieved mittens!

pinkmitten018.jpg pink mittens finished 1 picture by ashamanjababu

pinkmitten013.jpg pink mittens finished and hat picture by ashamanjababu

After all these years, I've finally managed to make a pair of mittens! Yay, my first mittens!

It's very odd, somewhere in the process of my last few knitted articles, I've actually started to enjoy knitting. I never thought that would happen! I've always considered knitting to be a means to an end: I need a hat, so I had better knit one. But I've really been enjoying the process this time. So much that after I finished these, I started another pair of mittens for my honeybunny, in bright red wool.

AND, I've also decided I'm going to start a sweater. It's pretty scary to me, but I bought a pattern and yarn and when I am done with the HB's red mittens, I'm going to start swatching.

This is the pattern I'm using. It's a bolero, so it won't take quite as long as a full sweater, and it's bulky weight, too. I went to my new favorite fiber shop, 3 Kittens, and bought yarn yesterday.

I think I've decided that I am a 'real' knitter now. Ha!

I know I said I wanted to finish the embroidery piece, or at least get a good chunk more work into it, before I finished the mittens, but it's getting cold here and I started wanting something on my hands, and worrying about how long it would be before I had something!

So I spent pretty much all day yesterday knitting the second mitten. Yesterday morning I had 2" of ribbing and now I have this:

pinkmitten007.jpg pink mittens 11 9 07 picture by ashamanjababu

pinkmitten007.jpg pink mittens 11 9 07 picture by ashamanjababu

It's at the point where I can start decreasing, and then the thumb and finishing should go pretty quickly! I never thought I would be one of those knitters who can throw together a project like this, but I guess all the practice has paid off. It also probably helps that I'm knitting at 5 sts to the inch. I think I need to make at least a dozen more projects on big needles with big yarn before I try going back to tiny needles again. These have gone so fast that I actually think a sweater might be in my knitting future, something I never would have said before.

One mitten done!

It turned out okay, and it sort of fits. I made it a litlte bit too long, but I guess I just must have been spacing out when I did that part, because the pattern was specific to the measurements. Oh well. I'm going to have to make the other one the same length, though, otherwise it will really bug me.

I got over my double-points panic attack.

evelyn123 gave me a much-needed reminder that I should knit however I feel like, not how someonet tells me to, if that doesn't feel right. (Thanks again - sometimes I just need a little hand-holding, and that helped.) So I was ready to dive in and start the 2nd one, which I did about 2" of ribbing on last night.

( mitten pictures )

All together, I like my mitten well enough, and I love the pattern. (I know I said the mitten was a little long, but that was my own error, not a flaw in the pattern.) Nancy Lindberg has a few more formula-type patterns besides this one; there are 2 sets of hats and a sock pattern. I've used the hat pattern twice and boths hats turned out great.

I really like the fact that since it is a formula, you can use any yarn/any gauge. I reccommend them to anyone who wants to knit a simple garment without having to make a million gauge swatches, or anyone who likes to buy yarn first and think about a pattern later (this is what I do).

January 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 2017

Style Credit

Style: Retro for Patsy by sforzinda

Navigation

Entries tagged with mittens

Mittens done

One mitten done

More mitties

mitties again

mitties

Mittens!

mittens

tiny, thumb-less mittens

Two mittens!

One mitten

mitten

bits of knitting

One last thing finished in 2008

mitten again; today's plan

mitten progress

What I did this weekend

Another mitten!

Yay! They're done!

I just can't stop

now I'm 1/2 there

Style Credit