mittens in july

So, there’s a story to this mitten. Well, two stories. The first is why I made a pair of mittens in the middle of summer – in payment to a good friend of mine for babysitting my ridiculous, pretty-not-smart cat for a month. The second is the process of figuring these mittens out.

I started a couple months ago with two balls of St-Denis Nordique, knowing that I wanted to make fairisle mittens with squirrels on them. My first stop was the Squirrel Sampler Mitten pattern. I liked it, but it called for fingering weight yarn and 2.5mm needles, and I was sure that if I knit them with the St-Denis yarn my mittens would end up gigantic. So I did a few Ravelry searches, and stumbled upon the Squirrel and Oak Mittens. These seemed perfect! DK-weight yarn! A squirrel!

And then I knit the first mitten – yes, the entire mitten – and realized that they were way, way, way, way too small at my gauge in fairisle. I have very small hands for an adult, and kids-size gloves often fit me, but I could not even work my hand into this mitten.

But, having my gauge in fairisle with this yarn and needle combination, I went back to the Squirrel Sampler pattern. It still looked like it’d be far too large if I knit it as written. But that’s about when I remembered that, on the St-Denis blog, there are printable blank mitten charts, made for her yarn, in various sizes.

I worked out that, at my gauge (slightly larger than the blank chart gauge) I’d have medium-sized mittens for my friend F if I knit the size small chart – 62 stitches.

So then I, uh. Bought the Squirrel Sampler pattern, which is 72 stitches around, and recharted it to 62 stitches. In hindsight, I’m sure there were simpler solutions to this problem, but whatever. This worked out, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, F likes her mittens and they fit, which is really the most important part.

So, yeah. My first fairisle experience was definitely a learning curve, but I’m glad I mastered this knitting skill. My Ravelry queue is suddenly much more attainable.

seasonally inappropriate!

I’ve been a little preoccupied, lately, in my knitting. I’ve got a couple of July birthdays coming up, and so a lot of my time has been spent on gift knitting that I can’t really share. This is awesome for me, because I love giving handknits to people who appreciate them, but kind of lame for the blog.

In the meantime, this is what I’ve been working on that I can share.

This past month, I’ve been living in a smaller city about an hour away from home, doing an internship-ish thing for school. In planning for this, I quickly realized that my cat – I’m sure you all remember, she’s the fuzzy one – wasn’t going to be able to come with me.

Fortunately, my good friend F now lives in the same city as I do. She loves cats, and she said she wouldn’t mind letting mine stay with her and her boyfriend for a little while. In exchange for doing me that amazing, awesome favour, she asked for mittens.

I asked her what kind of mittens, and she said that she wanted whatever kind I wanted to make. Then I asked her what colours she liked, and she told me that she liked. . .well, she gave me a list, but it was pretty well all possible colours. Finally – after a few hours of Ravelry browsing and some ambitious mitten plans swirling in my head, I asked her if she preferred birds, or squirrels.

She was very clear on that: she preferred squirrels.

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.