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Mittens, generally speaking, are a pretty quick project, even in fingering weight yarn. Especially when you have super tiny hands, like apparently I do. The mittens I’m about to show you, however, are not a quick project. I mean, if you look at the dates on its Ravelry page, you might think, “Hey! They only took you like a week! That’s fast!” And if I only had the time to knit in the evening or was working on a bunch of different projects, you might be right. But there are several days in there where I spent ALL DAY (like, eight hours) working on these buggers. So in actual number of hours, they took FOREVER for mittens.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re completely adorable, and I love the finished object (though sadly, they’re not for me). But do you see those quills? Each of those quills has about nine stitches in it. Nine fiddly stitches. And they cover the back of the hand.
Pattern: Hedgehog Mitts
Yarn: Recycled wool/acrylic/alpaca
Needles: US 4/3.5mm
Mods: They’re mittens, so you know I mostly just did my own thing and threw in the stitch pattern
Like I said, I love how they came out, and I think they’re really cute. There are several patters out there for Hedgie mittens, and to be perfectly honest, I think I’d recommend you try a different one. This one was pretty hard to follow. For one thing, the directions are written in paragraphs instead of line by line, like most knitting paragraphs, so it’s hard to find your place. For another, there are no finished measurements, so there’s no way to tell how big the sizes are until you’re halfway through knitting them. I wasn’t about to swatch a quill pattern, so I cast on the adult small/child large (it’s the same size, which is another problem), and hoped for the best. I wasn’t sure how the quills would react (I thought they might pull in a bit), but they ended up being a bit large. I decreased a bit and knit a longer cuff to compensate, but that was a step I wouldn’t have had to take if there had been finished dimensions.
See, I think I’ve probably knit about 200 pairs of mittens, fingerless mitts, and gloves over my knitting career. (Most of them were sharks.) I’m pretty familiar with the measurements I need to make them fit given a particular size of hand. I’m also pretty familiar with my gauge in various yarn weights as related to hand size. So I have no idea what my stitch or row gauge is for a dk yarn on size four needles, but I know that I need to cast on 40 stitches and increase two stitches every three rounds until I get 15 stitches for the thumb in order to get mitts that fit my hands. I can compensate for different sizes in a pattern based on my gauge and the given dimensions. I only cast on 40 stitches for my Northanger Abbey mittens because that’s how many I need for dk yarn and size four needles, even though the pattern said to cast on like 56 or something ridiculous (and the finished dimensions listed in the pattern supported my idea that they would come out WAY too big; I usually cast on 36 for mittens in the yarn and needle size called for in pattern). I’ve gotten very good at modifying mitten patterns to fit my little hands.
All that to say: I really need finished dimensions on patterns so I can modify. I’m not about to swatch to get the gauge you think I should; I much prefer to use my gauge modify on the fly. It’s a system that has served me well for many, many knitting projects. But I guess if you take the time to swatch and like math, you could probably figure out the estimated finished dimensions of a pattern based on cast on numbers and gauge. I don’t do math though, so that’s not for me.
Anyway, have some more pictures:
I made a hat! I would say it was so quick that you didn’t get to see a WIP, but I finish things so often (and make so many things) that I don’t have a lot of WIP posts anyway.
(If you can’t have fun taking pictures of a wool hat in August, I don’t know when you could)
Pattern: Capucine
Yarn: Recycled wool/viscose/cashmere/angora laceweight, which I doubled and navajo plied. Six strands total. Super thick.
Needles: US 10/6mm
Mods: None, knit exactly as written
I made this hat in two days, the bulk of the knitting being done in one. Huge yarn and huge needles makes for a SUPER quick knit. The pattern was clear and easy to follow and the change in textures kept things interesting. As if you could get bored with such a quick project.
The hat itself is super thick and super warm and I am desperately in love with it. I want fall weather and cold and snow so I can get back to wearing my copious cold-weather knits. I have so many hats and mitts and scarves (OH the scarves since I took up weaving) and sweaters to wear. It has been marginally cooler over the past weekend, but not nearly cool enough.
The weaving obsession continues. And continues.
Yarn: recycled and handdyed yarns. Warp: Sugical Waste Weft: Raspberry Stains
Loom: Easy Weaver
Reed: 8 dent
This prettiness started as a long strip of fabric. I sewed it together following this tutorial. There was a bit of swearing, especially when it turned out that despite my careful measuring, the lining was a bit smaller than the bag itself.
I think it came out well though. The lining is a bit of a cotton sheet (the same one I used to back my UMW quilt It’ll go in my bag of bags because lord knows I have a ton of them. Currently, I’ve got woven yardage waiting for a project stored in it.
I usually like to post every other day but apparently have a real job that requires me to be actually working (not knitting) makes that difficult. I’m gonna shoot for once or twice a week and call it a success. Anyway, I knitted a thing. The knitting’s been done for a while actually, but I’ve just recently (meaning last week) gotten photos of it. In my defense, I’ve been deep in the throes of another TV show obsession (BBC’s Sherlock if you must know. I have a thing for pretty British blokes who are clearly madly in love with each other).
On to the knitting.
Pattern: None, am sort of writing it up. Need to make another prototype.
Needles: US 5/3.75 mm straights
Yarn: 50/50 wool/acrylic
Yes, I wore tights. No, you cannot see my skivvies. Yes, I possibly had to shop out some lines. DON’T JUDGE ME. (And for the record, I am firmly on the side of tights are not pants, but you gotta do what you gotta do.)
Anyway, I put off photographing this for so long because I was convinced I would come up with a way to attach it to my socks without threading the ties through the ribbing and tying them together. I didn’t, obviously. I have to make another one for gauge/size issues anyway (this one was too big til I chucked it in the washing machine and drier and it shrunk a bit). I’ll probably attach something different to that one.
The pattern for this (if anyone’s interested) is sort of written but needs to be developed for clarity. On the off chance you’re interested in testing, please shoot me an email (or comment; I get those in my email too) and I’ll let you know if it’ll be ready for testing any time soon. I’d like it to be since I haven’t released a new pattern in a while and I’d like to continue expanding my library.
Unfortunately I have a billion sharks to knit first. Yes, still. Yes, I’m sick of them. I’m almost done though. I think. I hope.
So beading… not my strongest craft. I don’t really have the finesse required. But I made things! I made earrings! I made three pairs of earrings!
For the first pair, I followed a tutorial by Mich L in LA
I LOVE how these came out but they’re SO fiddly. The chain kept falling off the pin and the jump ring and there were ISSUES OKAY. Also, if you read through the tut, what Mich says about safety pins is true: THEY ARE SERIOUSLY ULTRA-HARDENED KRYPTONITE. It took a super long time to bend the ends of the pins into loops. SO LONG. It was definitely the longest part of the process.
Still, I think they came out SUPER pretty, and Mich’s tutorial is fantastic. I’ll definitely have to make some more variations on these because they’re both punk and feminine-pretty. So yay!
The next pair of earrings I made were SUPER simple.
Just a couple of jump rings and some leaf-shaped leather cut outs. They’re dangley and pretty and I like ’em.
The last pair is like a combination of the above two:
Simple leather shape on jump rings and some nonsense with a big red craft bead from a garland I bought at a Target after-Christmas sale (I have approximately 2397097837 of these beads) and a smaller bead cause the holes in the read beads are ENORMOUS.
Of the three pairs, I like these the least but I do like the red-on-black color scheme so I imagine they’ll get a decent amount of wear.
Now I seriously need to make some sort of jewelry display as currently, all of my jewelry is in a jumble on either my dresser or table next to my bed. Should probably fix that so I don’t lose my new ones.
So I made some more shark mittens:
I did tell you you were going to see a lot of them. These are made in acrylic though, as the customer has a wool sensitivity. I have another wool pair knit in pieces (mittens with fins and unblocked mouths) and I’m currently to the beginning of the thumb gusset in another pair. And then I have another pair after that. And two people who want to be alerted when I relist the pattern.
Gonna need to order some more Cascade Eco.
Stitch, Brinn, Stitch! 