We have a mitten:

And the back of the mitten too:

What, you thought I only knit the top side? :)

It’s Anemoi by Eunny.  The design is absolutely fabulous! it took me about 4 different tries to get the color combination I wanted. I was trying a variegated yarn instead of the rust-red, and while it was pretty, it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

I have one issue with the pattern in general, and because of that I might need to reknit this mitten.  The cuff is just too tight!  The pattern recommends using size 0’s to knit the cuff.  As you can see, the cuff is corrugated, using two colors. This means it has no elasticity whatsoever.  If I had knit it on size 0’s, I don’t think I would have been able to get the durned thing on at all!

I went up to size 2.75mm needles to knit this cuff, and while I can get it over my hand, it’s a bit tight.  Then in order to make the hand of the mitten not gargantuan, I dropped down to a 2.25mm needle to do the colorwork.  In between the cuff and the hand patterning, you increase 12 stitches, which is quite a lot. On the left mitten I’m casting on 8 more stitches, which I hope will give me enough room in the cuff to easily put it on and off. Then I’ll increase the final 4 stitches right after the cuff.

I can’t decide if want to try to block this mitten before I decide if I’ll keep it this way or not. It was quite fun to knit, and went pretty fast once I got past the entirely fussy cuff.  I’d be interested in finding out if others had this same issue with an overly-tight cuff, or if it was just me.

The office I work in now has a few heating issues. Mainly the specific office that I share with another person has no heat registers in it at all.  The other offices around us do, but not ours.  To combat this (and rather than getting up every 15 mins to do jumping jacks), I whipped up a pair of fingerless mitts:

Yarn: Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool
Pattern: Pop Up Paws
Gauge: who knows, but somewhere near 5 st/inch
Mistakes: many

The pattern is really great. I decided I didn’t want the thickness of actual stubby fingers while typing; so I just did a simple ribbing at the end.  The pattern has you do some short rows to give you more room on the knuckles and on the index finger area, vs the pinky - the mitt on the left has short rows, the one on the right doesn’t.  I decided the short rows were too fussy and I just wanted to get ‘em done last night.  I also added two rows of k1p1 on the top of the thumb to prevent any potentional rolling there.

They aren’t perfect, but they will work, and that’s the most important part.

PS. Merry Christmas!

What happens when you forget you’ve already found the end to a center-pull ball of yarn, and pull out a huge clump of yarn on the other side?

This mess.

I spent about 3 hours total detangling it. I had to detach it from the knitting in progress by breaking the yarn once. Once I did that it only took another hour or so to get the rest of it into a usable state. I haven’t started knitting on that project again yet. I think I’m afraid of it.

This should give you a better idea:

(click for bigger)

I’m making a pair of gloves from Knitting Fair Isle Mittens and Gloves. I’ve made mittens before, but not gloves, so I thought before I went hog wild and designed my own from scratch, I’d follow a pattern. Hmph. This book has some beautiful patterns in it, but the patterns are less than complete IMO. There is a ‘generic’ pattern which you can then supposedly plug in each set of charts to get a finished glove. Well, if you did it exactly like it said, you’d have a glove or mitten NOTHING like the picture. I’m having to infer a lot from the pictures. You have to shift the number of stitches you have for each portion of the project, to match up and make pattern repeats work. The gloves and mittens tend to run on the small side, so I’m adding a few extra stitches for a bit more ease. (Hopefully not too many).

The yarn?
Blue: Regia Silk sock yarn in a denim blue
Tan: Lorna’s Laces sock yarn in Aslan

Some new yarn, a bit of stash diving and I get this:

Any guesses as to what it is? (the answer tomorrow)

I bought some mitten kits last month and had even started the first mitten here. The yarn the kit came with wasn’t so great. It was rough. I don’t know if washing will soften it up or not, I haven’t gotten that far yet.. However, I decided to make some mittens using one of the kit patterns with another yarn that _is_ soft and the colors are just gorgeous. I finished the first one, and here it is laying out to dry after a very gentle blocking:

The grey isn’t quite that dark since it’s wet in the picture. It’s a really pretty medium heather grey, and lets the red yarn stand out really nicely.

I wasn’t sure how these mittens should fit. They feel a bit wide for above the thumb. They fit perfectly in the cuff area though. The kit yarn ball band gauge was 26 sts/4 inches. The yarn I used 22 stitches/4 inches. (So the yarn I used was slightly thicker). I knit it up at a fairly tight gauge. The fabirc of the mitten is nice and thick, yet still pliable.

I decided to knit the thumb before finishing the mitten top. I wanted to see how the top part fit, and had to open up the slit for the thumb first. This pattern uses a thumb gore (you can see it has it’s own separate pattern on the 2nd picture) which makes the top part of the mitten wider than the bottom part. The cuff fits me perfectly; but the top is a little bit loose. Since it’s a mitten I think that’ll be Ok. When this one is dry I’ll take a picture of me wearing it. I see lots of these mittens on people’s blog; but none wearing them.

Hat & Scarf report:
Daughter opened the present. Liked the scarf, but appears to care less about the hat. Figures. :) So far she’s put the hat on once after I prodded her all day about it. No picture yet, but it was adorable when she was wearing it. It came out on the slightly big side so hopefully she’ll fall in love with it later this winter or next year.

She did get a hat and mitten set made of polyester fleece from Grandpa
that she loves. She’s requested a white scarf to match them.

What did the UPS man bring me today?  A box containing these:

Well that’s all and good, but wait til you see the COLORS:

Charcoal grey with white, and a Raspberry with White.  I had to order online and didn’t really have a color card. I think they will make great looking mittens! Two of my winter-ish coats are red with black or red with white so these should go nicely. It’s gotten really cold here lately, so I really need to get cracking on these.

When I expressed concern that I’m not so good doing fair isle on DPNs, my friend Ingrid said "it gets easier with practice".  Here’s hoping she’s right!

I’m borrowing a book from a friend of mine that has the pattern for Landra’s Gloves.  The book was in pretty good condition except it had a page or two already trying to leave the rest of the book behind.  It’s an out-of-print book (as far as I can tell, although you can still order copies of it on Amazon), and I didn’t want to cause further damage to the book.

So I took the book to my local copy center, had them cut the binding off*, and put a spiral binding on it.  Voila, the book will now lay flat when opened and you can even close the book back on itself to see only one page at a time.  Best of all the pages will now stay in place!

How am I doing on Landra’s Gloves? (Which should really be named Nancy’s Gloves since I’m keeping them and not giving them to anyone named Landra). See?

* Yes, I got permission from the book-owner first.  She has other books now that she’ll probably do this to herself. :)

Sock differences

It’s been cold enough here lately to wear wool socks. The pair I was wearing yesterday had a slight difference between them:

I knit the one on the right first, and realized the pattern went way too far into the toe. I decided to make the pattern shorter on the second one, and not reknit the first one. Amazing, me not ripping something out! :)  They still feel great on my feet and work just fine. (If these had been a gift for someone else, I would have ripped out the first one or made the second to match)

Noro

I finally got this in the mail yesterday:

I’ve been perusing the patterns. There are a lot of great sweaters in this book. My first gripe is they don’t give schematics for the sweaters.  They do give actual sweater measurements and "to fit chest size" measurements.  My second gripe is almost all the sweaters seem to use bulky-ish yarn.  It’s too bad Noro doesn’t make a thinner version of the striping yarns.

Now I have to decide if I want a horizontally striping sweater/cardigan. (I’m not exactly at my skinniest right now)  The Hudson pattern is still my favorite, having a zipper closure and lots of ribbing to make it fit closer to the body without a lot of shaping.  However, it also has raglan sleeves. The only other raglan sweater I’ve made was Bob from knitty, and it really didn’t look good on me at all. (My mom now owns the sweater and it looks fab on her) I think that was more of a neckline style issue rather than raglan issue though.  If I pick a yarn that has more subtle stripes I think I can avoid (mostly) the "horiztonal stripes make you look fatter" rule.

Last night I ignored Hardangervidda, Mike’s secret socks, Katie’s new pair of socks, Katie’s sweater and I’m sure several other projects that I don’t even remember starting to knit on Landra’s Gloves from "Folk Knitting in Estonia : A Garland of Symbolism, Tradition, and Technique". I’ve made quite a bit of progress (knitting during Monday Night Football, which I could care less about, will do that for you).  Here’s the cuff (with pattern in book in the background)

And here I am modeling it:

This shot also shows the cool double cast on edge pretty well. It really adds alot of texture to the edge.

So, is it too big? I don’t mind that the cuff part isn’t totally snug, but definately want the glove part to be a snug (not tight, and not loose) fit.  I’m going to keep going on this one to see how it comes out.  I will also measure my gauge at some point (I know, blasphemy!) to see if I’m getting a tighter gauge than the pattern calls for. 

The pattern says it will fit a hand that is 8.5" around. I measured, and my hand is 7.5" at the widest portion.  That’s a pretty big difference, so we’ll see if my knitting is automatically compensating. If not, I have two choices:

• Use smaller needles (not likely since I’m already using 0’s)
• Reduce the number of stitches. This is problematic because the larger pattern on the cuff is a 14 stitch repeat. I’m currently using 70 stitches, and if I go down one size, then I’ll only have 56 stitches. That seems like it would be too small.

I am determined* to make the next project I start a pair of gloves for myself.

So the hunt for a glove pattern begins.  I have Vogue Knitting Mittens and Gloves and have been scouring magazines and my LYS bookshelf for some cool patterns/inspirations.  I haven’t knit gloves or mittens before; but if I can knit socks, how hard can gloves be? :)  I’m a bit dissapointed that the patterns I found for glove/mittens are either unpatterened and boring or of the latvian variety (with pointy ends, and lots and lots of colorwork), not quite my cup of tea.  I really want gloves.

I have several yarn choices. Some gorgeous Alpaca, koigu in deepest darkest blue (which looks black and featureless in the picture), and more koigu in a lovely camel color.  (And lets not mention all that neglected Koigu in my stash that is aging as we speak). All shown here:

I started with the Alpaca, tried a k2p2 cuff on 48 stitches. It fit and looked ok, but I don’t want whole gloves made out of variegated yarn.  I then moved on to the deep blue koigu and knit about an inch on a pattern from this book that had two cables and some moss stitch patterning. In the deep blue you couldn’t really see the patterns very well, but I might have been satisfied with it if it weren’t too big. 

The camel colored Koigu I bought will go well with the Alpaca.  I found this mitten in a book my friend Judy loaned me.  (also seen here in different colors with some really great tips on knitting gloves) I have started this, using the koigu as the background color, and will use my alpaca as a single color throughout whenever it calls for another color.  So far this pattern is winning, and I hope to get enough knit tonite to make it travel-worthy. (Yes, I am ignoring Mike’s secret socks for now)

In my quest for glove patterns, I remembered this cool pattern Judy made:
http://www.tata-tatao.to/knit/simplegloves/herringbone.html
Warning: it’s in japenese, and babelfish will get you only so far. There are charts, and Judy made a great pair of gloves from it without knowing an iota of Japenese. so it is possible.

(Many thanks to my spinning/knitting group who laughed with me as I started about 5 times tonite, counting/mis-counting, dropping needles, trying a few new cast ons, dropping needles, trying a 6 stitch cable w/out cable needle, babbling and mumbling about how the pattern had an error (it didn’t) and what pattern should I use?  Of course they were right, you couldn’t see the cable in the dark yarn.)

Oh, yeah.
I finished sleeve 2 on Hardangervidda. I have put away almost all my needles except the one I will need to finish the neckline/placket.  I am gearing myself up to measure and cut the sleeve steeks.  I thought maybe tonite, but now that it’s here, I’d rather knit on my gloves!

*read as I will make a pair of gloves for myself no matter how many times I have to rip out & start over, how many yarn/pattern combos I have to go through and no matter how long it takes.