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.

i knitted you a hat all blue and gold

I don’t know if you guys have heard, but it was very, very cold here this weekend. Fortunately, I had the luxury of staying in and not accomplishing much, so I sat around with a few episodes of Lost Girl (so Canadian, trashy as only a show about sexy urban fantasy can be, so addictive) and made stuff.

1. I made this big orange thing, which I will blog about soon. It’s currently in my sink, getting a bath.

2. I worked on my Fiddlehead mittens. I actuallly finished most of the fairisle knitting for these mitts over the Christmas holidays, but I forgot to blog about any of it. They’re from a Tanis Fiber Arts kit I bought in the summer of 2009, in the Shadow/Deep Sea/Peacock/Seabreeze/Spearmit/Buttercup colourway. They got put aside for a while in my stash, and then for a while in my unfinished knitting pile.

This is in part because I am lazy, and in part because I occasionally need practical motivation to make stuff. (This may also fall under “I’m lazy,” it’s not totally clear.) But, the thing is, until recently, I already had a pair of mittens. My Bella’s Mittens from 2009 have lived in my coat pockets pretty much since then, and I loved them. They were purple. They kept my hands warm.

And then, on Friday, I lost them. I don’t know where or how. In fact, I spent most of the weekend thinking I’d just left them in my locker at work, but when I got there yesterday morning, I realized they really had disappeared.

Apparently, “my hands are cold” is the kind of motivation I need to finish a new pair of fancy mittens. Who knew.

They’re not totally done – the second mitten needs a bath and an inner mitten – but they’re more than halfway there.

Following advice from pretty much everyone on Ravelry, I knit the inner mitt quite a bit smaller than the pattern recommended. I ended up going down a needle size (from 3.75mm to 3.5mm) and decreasing to 45 stitches around. I also worked the hand and thumb decreases as the outer mittens. They fit into the outer mitts perfectly.

Hopefully soon, my hands won’t be so cold.

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.