Hey there! Welcome to anyone who is a first time visitor that hopped by from yesterday’s post over at Fifty Shades of 4 Ply!
Also, welcome back to my regular gang! It’s been a while, right? Well, I’m still kicking and have been knitting my butt off lately. I have a lot of projects to update you all on, plus a lot of (REALLY) exiting real life news (that you may have seen on my Facebook Page)… but first thing’s first!
I was recently asked to take part in the Scheepjes blog hop and I had the perfect idea for what I wanted to do! One thing I’ve never made, but have been meaning to for ages – MITTENS! The perfect Christmas project!
I had a look around to see what I wanted to make, and since it’s been a while since I tried a fair isle project, I settled on Jorid’s Christmas Heart, which you can find for free here on her website!
I used the following materials:
Yarn: Scheepjes Donna (643 – White, 708 – Red, 707 – Green)
Needles: 3.0mm & 2.5mm double pointed needles
Having never made mittens before I was totally unfamiliar with how thumbs are made, and also about sizing. When I read the pattern I had trouble figuring out how you use the same sized needle regardless of which weight of yarn you choose and in the end I decided to just start knitting and see where it took me. I am really terrible at math and any calculations in knitting make me twitch. I try, but it often requires me to rip things apart and start over. Thankfully that was not the case with these mittens, although I did tweak the pattern a bit along the way.
I really loved working with this yarn, it’s soft and I could tell that the mittens would be nice and warm. It wasn’t long before I realized that the mittens were going to work out to be way too big for me, though. Just as I suspected, knitting the pattern in DK weight yarn meant that I was going to have a mighty big mitt! So I decided to try changing a few things along the way.
I did the thumb hole as indicated on the chart and started trying on the mitts as I went along. It was at the point in the above photo where I realized that if I didn’t make a change, the mittens were going to be way too big for me. I still had a few more heart sections to go and once I uncurled the mittens, I didn’t have a lot of finger left! The width was fine, but the length was turning out to be an issue.
*Disclaimer* I must admit here, this may not be the fault of the mittens, but rather the fault of my freakishly small hands. Even in shops I tend to have better luck with children sized gloves than women sized! So only pay attention to my adjustments if you also have fairly small hands. Also, if you are making the gloves in fingering weight yarn the size will probably be much smaller. I’ve seen comments on Ravelry with people complaining about the mitts being TOO small. They had to be using fingering weight yarn, because I’ve not met any giants on Ravelry yet.
Anyway, I decided that I would remove one heart section out of the pattern, to create a shorter mitt. To do this I skipped rows 45-50 in the chart. Row 44 and row 51 in the chart are the same, so at row 44 I just skipped up to row 51, cast off the purl stitch and knitted until the end. I did the same in the thumb pattern, knitted to row 11, skipped 12 – 17 and continued from row 18 to the end. This made for a much better fit for me.
Even with the changes I feel like I have plenty of room in the hands, they are certainly not small. I got my husband to try them on and he said the only problem was that the thumb was way too short. Well, obviously… look at the photo, I have the thumbs of a 4 year old!
I have to say I was really surprised at how quickly these knitted up. I had so much on my plate that in the weeks running up to the blog hop I was really worried I wouldn’t get them finished. Having never made mittens, plus them being fair isle, which I’ve not done in a while, I made sure to give myself plenty of time. In the end it really only took me a day or two for each mitten, which is nothing compared to some of my other recent projects.
I really like these mittens, and I love the yarn. I think it would be the perfect yarn for hats, which are next on my hit list. I recently bought a new jacket in a color I never really wear, so I will need to knit myself some accessories to go with it. I can see a hat being really nice and warm in this yarn, and NOT ITCHY, which is most important to me. Itch factor can really put me off a yarn forever.
Some other tips about this project. Firstly, you have to be comfortable with double pointed needles (unless you want to have a go at making these with the magic loop method, which I’m sure must be possible). Also, the biggest tip I can give, I found from my knitting guru Staci from Verypink.com. It had been so long since I knitted anything in fair isle that I felt like I needed a few more fingers to control the different strands. Then I found this video and heard the angels singing:
I’ve been curious about continental knitting anyway but this gave me the push I needed to give it a go. Now I can knit double stranded like a champ! I can knit continental while doing fair isle, but not while just knitting with a single color, weird, right? I have also not even attempted to purl or do anything else continental. Baby steps.
If you are working on this or any other fair isle project, it’s such a great way to deal with the multiple strands. I highly recommend it!
HEY! Before you leave! Don’t forget to hop on over to Vicarno.com tomorrow to see her blog hop project! If you haven’t been following along, you can see them all on the Scheepjes Facebook Page.
Those are really pretty!