just kidding – unless you’re gon’ do it.

I’m slowly knitting away at the work I’m doing for P-, and getting close to being done!

This is off the needles, although all the finishing – sewing down the ends and adding fringe – is still on the go, but I’m very excited about it. I’ve also started on the second piece I need to get done, and it is flying off the needles like nothing.

I started this yesterday (it’s a hat – the Lucky 7 Hat, to be exact) and I’m already close to the crown. I think there’s something about cables that just makes me knit faster.

Song of the Entry: Jenny Owen Young – Hot in Herre

or do you take pride in being an insufferable know-it-all?

So, I tend to have two projects on the go at any given time: a “thinking” project, that I save for home, and a mindless project for school. Right now, my thinking project is my Shetland Lace Shawl, which is on hold for a week or so while I focus on a mindless project that should be very familiar to a lot of people.

This is actually my first for-reals commissioned work – a scarf in Gryffindor house colours. (For the record, Recipient: the real scarf is slightly less yellow than it looks in these photos; I took them at night.) It’s knit in a tube, so the entire project is mindless stockinette, and it’s actually turning out to be the perfect project to knit during lectures, because I barely have to think about anything while I work at it.

fo: thrummed mittens

It is so, so satisfying to have these mittens done. They were a positive project experience from start to finish, which was such a delight. I’m so glad to have made them, too – playing with roving to make the thrums was a really satisfying, educational experience (that does not make me want to learn to spin, I swear), and I managed to split the colour changes just right to have two mittens that matched, exactly the way I was hoping they would.

They’re also going to be almost inhumanly warm, which you perhaps can’t tell from the photo above, but you can definitely tell in this picture.

Pattern: the Fleece Artist “thrum mitten” pattern from my LYS, sort of.
Yarn: Fleece Artist Merino Sliver roving, 50g, and one skein of Cascade 220 in black
Needles: 4mm dpns

Modifications: I did a lot of googling before I started this project, and came to a few decisions about things I wanted in my mittens that weren’t in the pattern I had. I wanted a bit of a ribbed cuff – so I knit that, instead of the cuff in the pattern. And then I wanted to have staggered rows of thrums, so I went ahead and did that, too. By the time I got to the top of the mitten and the thumb, I’d sort of given up on reading the pattern, so I went ahead and made them up – but I feel like they’re pretty close to what was written, so whatever.

I also added an idiot string – partly on the advice of Julie, who pointed out that these mittens are not going to fit in my pockets, which, if you’re me, means that there’s a good chance I’ll lose one. I also added it in part because I’ve always wanted to make myself mittens on a string. Just because.

I knit the string by picking up 3 stitches from the cuff, on the side opposite the thumb. I then worked roughly 342098 meters of i-cord, and when I felt that it was about as long as my armspan (plus a bit extra) I picked up three stitches from the cuff of the other mitten, in the same place, and grafted it to the i-cord.

It was wonderful. I wish that I could make these mittens not-black for just a minute, so that I could do a better job of showing you how well it worked out.