Mostly About Mittens

A mini-blizzard blew through yesterday, first pelting us with several inches of icy white stuff, then dripping hours' worth of freezing rain that pocked and scoured off much of the snow that just fallen. Sometime during the night, the rain turned back into snow, and we woke to a fresh snowfall this morning.

The media hype leading up to this event was rather overblown (ha! weather pun!); words of panic and fear flew about more thickly than did the snow at the height of the storm. I do love Wisconsin in the wintertime. :)

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In other news, the Socks of Doom, having languished on a side table while I knit a pair of mittens with the leftover yarn, are ready and eager to be mailed.

Doom? Us?

It feels as though I've been working on these two projects (socks and mittens) for a small lifetime, though it's only been about six or seven weeks of Sundays. Stranded colourwork, I find, requires a quiet atmosphere and long stretches of free time; if I try to squeeze it in between other jobs, the knitting suffers. (Not that knitting ever goes smoothly for me, even at the best of times....)

Unlike the Socks, the mittens came together fairly easily. To honour the giftee and her Norwegian heritage, I'm naming them Nikki's Nordic Mittens.

Nikki's Nordic Mittens are based on the Generic Norwegian Mitten Pattern by Adrian Bizilia. I used 3x3 rib for the cuffs, then did 2 rows of purl stitch for texture before starting the colourwork pattern. The mitten back is done in a combination of motifs found online (I googled "Fair Isle motifs"); the palm is a diamond pattern, slightly widened to fit a multiple of 5 stitches.

I think I like the palms even better than the backs....

The afterthought thumbs were a new technique for me - a bit scary, but thanks to this post by A Kitten Knits and this post by Mary Jane Mucklestone they worked out beautifully (especially after some duplicate stitching at the corners to take care of the seemingly-inevitable gaps caused by picking up stitches).

Real stitch or duplicate stitch? Only the knitter knows....

For the sake of simplicity, I worked the thumbs as tubes (rather than flat and peaked like the mitten fronts and backs). It took a bit of thought to come up with decreases that would preserve the checkerboard pattern; I finally settled on paired ssk and k2g decreases which I worked on the underside of the thumb. There's probably a better way to hide decreases in very small pieces of stranded colourwork - if you know it, do please tell in the comments!

Checkerboard decreases (which sounds like the name of
a 70s soft-rock song)

I wasn't sure how to bind off the colourwork at the  mitten tips, so I just tied off the grey side bands, using the yarn tail to link the top two stitches, then worked a little blue bridge of Kitchener over the grey:

Bonus picture of mitten innards:

Knowing my own limitations, I chose worsted-weight yarn for these projects (rather along the lines of giving oversized crayons to the toddler who's just learning to write); even at that scale they posed quite a challenge. I really admire knitters who work stranded colourwork in finer-gauge yarns.

The Socks of Doom and Nikki's Nordic Mittens

Every so often I get bit by the knitting bug ... but I think the fever has now worked itself out. I'm ready to get back to crochet!

Next post: Valentine-y crochet coasters.

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What are you working on?

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