Experimenting

I've been taking a brief respite from my nursing research and doing a little experimenting of my own--with yarn and double-pointed needles this time. You see I do my best thinking and writing late at night and my compute corner gets kind of chilly. I wear nice wooly socks on my feet so they don't get cold but my poor hands are not so fortunate. I tried making a pair of Fetching mitts for myself but that Aran wt. yarn is a bit chunky and the mitts feel a bit cumbersome to me. So I decided to look online for a fingerless mitts pattern that used a skinnier yarn but didn't come up with anything to my satisfaction. So, as I mentioned in my last post. I decided to design my own pattern.

Several weeks ago I bought a cone of dk weight 50% cashmere/50% merino yarn from Richard at ColourMart with the express intent of knitting some fingerless mitts out of it. Originally I thought I could just adapt the Fetching pattern but the yarn was much finer than I had anticipated even after washing, so I knew that wouldn't work. Besides, I love lace so a lacy pattern would be great. I came across a sock design from a great knitter here in Knoxville, Judy Sumner of KnoxSocks (Knoxsocks Designs Sock Knitting Patterns by Judy Sumner) that used a really basic lace motif that appealed to me. So I took that and added some ribbing, and after some trial and error I came up with a lace pattern that was easy, stretchy, and appealing to my eye. One of the challenges was to get a snug fit around the wrist but then how do I get enough room for my hand? I thought back to the things I've been learning from Liz Lovick in the Gansey Workshop over on EZasPi and found my answer--gussets! In gansey sweaters gussets are using in the underarm area to allow for comfortable movement. So I played around with increases and found that placing a gusset on the front and back of the thumb with one panel of lace separating them was the perfect amount of room to accomodate the entire hand and still maintain a close fit. And as you can see from the 1st picture the increases transitioned perfectly into additional lace panels. Boy did I feel accomplished having figured this out :-)


I've finished knitting the first mitt as you can see, and it fits my medium/large hand perfectly. The second mitt is about half done and I can't wait to finish it so I can wear it --only the coldest hand gets a mitt tonight :-( I plan to knit another pair out of a different yarn and try to finesse the pattern a bit more before I put it out for the world to enjoy. But I have plenty of the cashmerino left so I think a matching pair of socks is in order. It will be my next experiment in designing with yarn.

The Good and Bad of being Cold

It's been cold here in East TN lately, really cold, like <20 F cold which is cold around here. My space at home is downstairs where it tends to be much colder than the upstairs (one of those thermodynamic principles, you know) and I sleep late and stay up into the wee hours of the morning when everyone else is in bed and the thermostat has been turned way down. In short, it's cold, esp. at my computer. So I decided I really needed to get with it and knit some fingerless gloves for myself. I started in on another pair of Fetching mitts out of the same dark gray yarn I used for my sister's Christmas present. This is good, but gray is dark and not very inspiring and aran wt. yarn makes for thick mitts, which isn't necessarily bad--just thick. So I dropped in on Jinka and Piper at Loopsville on Wednesday to find something cheery to knit my Fetching mitts out of. Does yummy merino yarn have to be in dark colors just because it's winter? I am rebelling! No, I settled for a medium shade of denim blue that will work for me and my sister (although I really wanted pink).

So all this is leading me up to the point of my post which is that I decided to design my own fingerless mitts out of yarn that is pretty and soft and not so well, fat. I surfed the net and found one pattern that I liked but it cost money, which was OK, but the ordering process to get the pattern was exceedingly cumbersome and the shipping policy was, well, a bit much for one simple pattern. So forget that, I can figure this one out myself. And there is that lovely ColourMart cashmerino dk sitting on my shelf which I bought with mitts in mind.... So I have the first mitt almost done--and it looks way cool! I'm taking careful notes so I can write out the pattern and share it with my friends. I might even become famous and get listed in Knitting Pattern Central and have lots of people come and visit my blog and well, gosh! So here's a pix or two. Oh and a pix of my niece dressing up like a rich, chic "French lady" (scarf and chignon) for all my pals on EZasPi (sorry the pix is a bit blurry but it was early for me). Knit on!