Mittens!

Some friends asked me to make them mittens a couple of weeks ago. So we went back and forth about what they wanted and what I thought I was capable of. Joe picked some fairly simple knitted mittens that I thought I could just about manage. Turns out I can knit a mitten in a day, even with back-to-back migraines trying to keep me down! Who would have thought.

And they're fancy, with a folding cuff. Joe is color blind so he wanted black. I thought that was boring so made the cuff a light green. He'll never know the difference.

Because I don't knit that often I had no idea you could create a thumb just by adding stitches, but you can, and it's like magic.

But that doesn't mean I wasn't totally intimidated by the thumbs and left them until the last minute. Then after some YouTube surfing, I figured it out.

Putting 12 stitches on three needles is kind of an ungainly mess, but it really does produce a thumb.

Ta-da! Some straightforward buttons, and a single crochet edging around the cuff to finish them off. I have enough yarn left over to do another pair with the colors reversed. Those should look nice as well.

Should be nice and toasty. Now if the stupid weather would drop down out of the 60s, that would be nice.

Ilana wanted fingerless gloves, and now I'm feeling cocky, so I'm knitting them on size 1 needles and also included beading.

Because it means I get to do my favorite thing, which is work from CHARTS. Woo!

Om nom nom nom

Some time early last year my friend Sheila sent me a link to some pretty cute mittens, with a strong hint that maybe I should make them for her. She's a diver who lives in Alaska, and any chance she can get to flee to warm water, she takes.

So I filed the pattern away for a later time. Not long before Christmas I took a look at it, and wow. The mittens are made using Tunisian crochet, which up until this point I'd only used to make a nice square blanket. So that was kind of intimidating And the pattern was written for an 8-year-old boy, and the author's advice for making mittens for adults was basically "add some rows and stitches." AND her advice for making the other mitten was "reverse shaping." I can follow any directions in the world, but those are the kind of directions I really do not appreciate.

Sigh. So I procrastinated for a ridiculously long time. And then, as you might expect, I had to stop and start again several times, realize that they STILL weren't big enough, start over, lather, rinse repeat. I only recently finished the things and got them in the mail.

And then there was that huge west coast storm, so they didn't arrive until last week. Gah! It's always something.

So anyway, I didn't take any photos of the mittens while they were underway because if I stopped long enough to do that there was a very good chance entropy would set in and I would NEVER get them done. But here they are in their finished glory. They only just barely fit over my gigantic man hands, and it's pretty clear that I only figured out the whole decrease situation on the second mitten, but I think they still turned out pretty well, despite the many obstacles.

It's always the eyes that bring this kind of thing to life.

They're not exactly sharks to strike fear in one's heart.

But they do have red scary mouths and lots of teeth and speckled bellies.

Cute, yes?

And here they are in their new home!