Ahh mittens, glorious mittens, I love them so much! I love to knit them, wear them, design them, pretty much anything with mittens I am game. I have more than one person can wear in a week, and always have one started somewhere, and another 2, 3, 4 planned.
From left to right: Shimmer Mittens, random mittens from my teenage youth, Aquarelle Mittens, Jewelled Prism Mittens, Mesmerizing Mittens, Kaleidoscope Mittens
I am especially in love with the Estonian mitten patterns, all that lovely stranded patterning, and the geometric designs sing to my heart! Below is a mostly finished Kalev's Mitten from Nancy Bush's Folk Knitting in Estonia. I changed the cuff to be a single color ribbed cuff and used three colors instead of two.. because.. hello art degree, I can't actually help myself from redesigning most things.
Hopefully I will have time to finish the second one soon, typically I work on something complicated when the girls are at ballet and I sit in the car and knit while listening to an audiobook. I knit these Gnome Mittens designed by SpillyJane for the Hubs during ballet a few years ago.. and he has never worn them!! Not his fault actually, there are a million ends on the inside I never worked in... da da daaaa... so procrastination won that particular battle. Perhaps I will do it this week since Spokane is in the middle of a cold snap. I also changed these to have a gusseted thumb since his hands are so large and just worked the increased stitches in a checkerboard pattern using whatever color was present in the row.
My newest and most unexpected love are actually fingerless mittens, previously dismissed as completely useless ( I mean really, fingerless mittens, doesn't there seem to be a point missing in there?) But I do all my pattern writeups and blog typing at my desktop upstairs, and we have an old house, turned 100 3 years ago. The upstairs was a reno of the attic, and the back half of the house was added in the 50's. The really interesting part is that we know this because the lady who owned the house and renovated it showed up with her daughters 2 years ago on Mother's Day for a visit and gave us loads of history on this charming place. Like for example where I am sitting right now actually burned down at one point thanks to a candle, a piece of driftwood, a 13 year old and the laissez faire 1960s.
So Charming and full of history and definitely funky now that we live here but for the love of yarn this upstairs is so COLD. I think that between the interesting heating venting, attic renovation and what I suspect is a complete lack of insulation.. the office is cold, dang cold. Like 15 degrees colder than the downstairs in the winter and the summer is like a furnace. So blogging this winter has been... uncomfortable to say the least, and lest my work suffer from issues that my work is actually supposed to SOLVE enter the fingerless mitten! Savior of upstairs bloggers everywhere.
These are worked in Malabrigo Rios in my favorite colorway called Archangel and the pattern is a River Runs through Mitt by Amy Pelletier. Simple, quick, fun and perfect for blogging, I stand corrected the point of fingerless mittens are my 5 points sticking out the end.
