little mitts

Happy Holidays my lovies! (we may not've met, but if reading this blog gives you any amount of joy, then I love you)

Here are a little pair of mitts I made to keep my fingers toasty this season. The woodland mitts by Mandarine's was the runner up pattern, but as I am the one whose fingers are always cold, mitts with holes in them just didn't make sense, as lovely as they are, so I went with Tin Can Knits Maize pattern 

instead.

In the interest of frugality, I bought just one skien of Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light in the colourway Moonshadow (I loved this yarn way more after I learned that was it's name). This was an experiment in yarn weights, because the pattern calls for worsted, but mine was on the sport–light-worsted end of things. I cast on the size small, got to the end of the ribbing, and decided to go up a size. So I cast on the medium, knit until just past the thumb hole, and realized it was still too small. This is were things came to a bit of a standstill, because according to the pattern I didn't have enough yarn to knit the size large, but I didn't want to buy a second skein (this was back pre-job, and I was that broke). So I looked at some other patterns, looked at some of the yarn in my stash, and considered scrapping the whole project until my Dad was visiting and gave me $20 "for snacks". Ha. Next possible chance I was at the yarn picking up skien #2, and casting on the size large (I did spend the leftover on snacks).

After that, things went fairly quick. I didn't make any changes to the pattern other than shortening the ribbing a little (too much), and knitting the whole hand in stockinette. I guess all I needed was that margin for error the second skein provided, because as it turned out, I finished both mitts with still a decent sized ball left of the first skein, and I returned the second (to buy more yarn, of course).

Then I gave them a "woolly tattoo", very much inspired by Dottie Angel. Having done next to no embroidery prior to this, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and it took just a little longer than a "Two Towers" viewing to complete (the extended edition, but still). Stuck on a design for the embroidery, I ended up adapting the frame from this logo by Katt Frank.

I got very into knitting this fall, more so than usual. I think I've mentioned before that I don't seem to do much knitting or crochet during the warmer months, so getting some wool in my hands in the early fall always gives me the excitement of a new hobby. However, it has now been several falls since I began my yarn expeditions in ernest, enough so that this October it was like picking up a hobby that I was already good at. I daresay I may be an advanced beginner now, perhaps even dabbling in intermediate!