Jan 14, 2010

A Tale of Two Mitties

It was the best of times, it was the worsted of ti... sorry. I am a slave to even the most belaboured of puns. Besides which, the knitting project I am going to speak about was made from sock weight yarn!

I made some mittens for a design collaboration with my friend, Kristine. Thankfully, I test knit the adult size, because they do not fit quite as well as I would have hoped. There is too much room above the fingers and not enough room between the cuff and the thumb, meaning they always feel like they are just about to fall off. I corrected the pattern and sent it off, but that left me with a pair of slightly ill-fitting mittens.

I was finally motivated to make a new pair when I started cycling, and was given the gift of an iPod (Thanks Ben!). Both activities necessitate the use of my hands, so I set about making a pair of Broad Street Mittens using the 100 Purewool Merino Fingering I purchased quite some time ago. The pattern has some gaps in the instructions, but I was able to improvise and I was really happy with the end product. The last part of the project was completed in Ireland, where my brother, Sam, saw them and asked that I make him a pair. I adapted the Knucks pattern, which has a child's size, and made him a pair in Noro Silk Garden Sock.

289 reprazent!
I got back to the US, and wore my mittens all of twice before losing them. I searched high and low for them. I phone-stalked the Olive Garden I had been to that day, ransacked a friend's house and even had my realtor search her office for them. They were gone. I don't deal with loss at all, and found this particularly hard to cope with as I was homesick and they were a memory of a fun time with my brother.

I tortured myself with the idea of finding them for over a week before deciding that I had to come up with a more productive way of forgetting about them. I have more of the yarn I used to make them, so decided to reknit them in time for my Father and Brother's upcoming visit in February. I prefer the colourway of the new mittens and once I repose the silly photo of me and my brother in our matching FOs, I will be chock full of closure.



I just hope that someone out there is enjoying my orange mittens.



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