a fine pair of mittens with wheel

My Fiddleheads are done. I am utterly enchanted. These mittens are very close to perfect, and I cannot believe how proud I am of having made them. I wore them for the first time about a week ago, when it was a blustery -13C, my hands were toasty warm. (It’s possible that I also kept checking myself out in store windows and thinking, wow, these mittens are pretty.)

(This is, for the record, mostly a credit to the prettiness of the pattern and the cleverness of the TFA kit colours. I made no decisions when it came to these mittens, except to finally knit them.)

I mean, they are not perfect. They’re my second stranded finished project ever, and I can see where I could have improved, and places where the fabric pinches a little bit. But for the most part, they are beautiful, and super cozy, and very close to the right size (a little long, but I can live with that).

I didn’t get around to photographing them until this weekend, and the light was so nice and my wheel was out and, um. I got a bit excited.

Whatever. They’re very nice mittens.

two week sweater

Finally, something finished to share with all of you!

This is the big orange thing from my last entry, all finished and blocked.

So, to understand this sweater, I first have to remind you all of that trip I took this summer, to visit New York. I stopped in at Knitty City, where I saw madelinetosh yarn for the very first time. I was utterly enchanted, and at the time, I hadn’t seen any in Canadian yarn shops before. So, naturally, I really wanted to buy a sweater quantity of it to take back home and make into something pretty for myself. And so – after a lot of waffling over colours – I wandered out of the store later that day, feeling very pleased, carrying four skeins of madelinetosh vintage in glazed pecan.

I have no idea why I thought 800m worsted weight yarn was, in fact, enough for a sweater. It is not.

I spent a fair while on Ravelry, looking for patterns that would give ma full sweater using that little yarn, and finally I landed on Every Last Yard, and my life was forever changed. Guys, this is an amazingly clever pattern.

Basically, this is a top-down raglan sweater pattern. Except better. It starts with the collar, and the yoke is picked up from that, and then the entire sweater, edges and all, is knit top-down. There are no button bands to pick up. You don’t have to save extra yarn to go back and do anything. Once you’re done the yoke, you’re done, so that you can stretch your yardage as far as possible, the way you would with a pair of toe-up socks.

I actually had even less than this pattern called for, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get a full sweater with long sleeves out of what I had. So, I decided to use the first three skeins to knit the yoke and body. Instead of binding off when I was done, I put the body on holders, knit the sleeves, and went back to use any leftovers to make the body even longer. I also modified the original pattern so that the lace portion started immediately after the waist shaping, to get the very most out of my yardage and stretch it into a hip-length sweater.

I love it. It fits wonderfully. It’s a perfect transition-weather sweater, and I plan to wear it an awful lot.

I’m also completely smitten with this colour! I was really, really nervous about it, since I tend to shy away from reds and yellows and oranges with my hair, which is also red and yellow and orange. But now that I own an orange sweater (although, okay, it’s kind of a sandy orange-brown), I find I’m wearing it a fair bit, and it doesn’t feel too bright at all.

mittens mittens mittens

You guys know the drill by now: I have an exam, therefore I spend a weekend locked in my apartment with my knitting and (several) cups of coffee and learn as much as I possibly can.

This is the knitting that came out of this weekend’s studying.

For a long time, I was against fingerless mittens sort of on principle. I didn’t really understand the point of them – if it was cold enough for mittens, I figured it’d be best to wear the kind that covered my whole hand, instead of just a part of it. But then I started biking to school, and now I totally understand why, in the fall, it’s really nice to have something to keep my hands warm, but lets me bike safely.

The pattern is Wild Growth, the aran weight version, and I knit it up in indigodragonfly Aran Merino, in Deep Thoughts. They’re very blue-green, which suits my tastes just perfectly. The instant gratification of knitting with worsted weight yarn again is kind of fantastic, too.