What I did this weekend

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.