I'm a good girl, I am

I'm not so heartless as to steal my mother's mittens and leave her un-woolied for any great length of time. As promised I cast on on Monday night and finished her new pair on the train on Tuesday:


Another pair of Maine Morning Mittens to the standard pattern, this time in Fleece Artist Kid Aran in Woodland - fluffy, soft and incredibly warm.

I promised mittens and I have delivered. Or at least, as of this lunchtime I have entrusted a small squishy envelope to the post box and may the Royal Mail have mercy on its fibres.

Confession

Saturday lunchtime, as I waved H off for another afternoon of queuing on golf tees, I had a phone call. My mother, frozen to the bone after a morning of organ practice in an unheated church, petitioning for the early arrival of a requested Christmas present - a pair of fingerless mittens that would keep her hands warm but allow her to fully stretch to play the notes.

Always keen to chalk up a few points in the 'my daughter is angelic' column (rather than the 'my daughter is ferociously independent and this worries me' column occupied during my teens and early twenties), I fished out the remainder of the Manos wool silk used for Dolly's Mittens, and cast on another pair of slightly altered Maine Morning Mittens.

I knit while we visited a friend's new flat on Saturday, and settled down on Sunday afternoon with the Dr Who omnibus on the tv, the new quilt, and this snuggliest of yarns.

To make sure that they were extra stretchy at the top for full range of movement I used the 'new' extra-stretchy cast off from the latest Knitty which looks great and does exactly what it says on the tin - I'm definitely using it again the next time I do toe up socks.

This is a wonderfully simple pattern, and a great quick knit, especially when you aren't adding buttonholes and so I zoomed around and around for several contented hours until it was dark, and I had a pair of finished mittens.


Then this morning as we headed out the door to work I grabbed an envelope and the mittens with the full intention of posting them at lunchtime.

And here is where I must confess.

Outside at the moment (according to the BBC) it is about 12C and sunny (I can verify the sunny). That's about normal for this time of year, it's a nice day. In my office, our slightly dubious thermometer, filched from the wall on one of the other floors, suggests that it's somewhere around 18C.

Our building heating runs at two settings; off and on; and after a week of 'on' left many people gasping for fresh air and verging on heatstroke, the decision was made that we would be 'off' until the end of October. It's a perfectly logical decision because every floor apart from my one little section has a built in air con unit that can also provide heat.

Me, well I arrived wearing a cardigan, a shawl and my jacket and I'm still wearing them, and as my fingers cooled and chilled as the sedentary nature of my work took effect, I thought of the mittens in my bag and my own winter mittens, which currently look like this:


If you look on Ravelry I christened the pink mittens 'Frozen Organist Mittens'. I'm going to have to change them to 'Frozen Lawyer Mittens'.

Started on Saturday.
Sewn up on Sunday.
Misappropriated on Monday.

Sorry Mum.

On the plus side I have remembered some yarn in the stash that may be your perfect combination of chocolate, lime and blue, and I know you weren't desperately keen on brilliant fushcia ...

... I know, I know, I'll be casting on as soon as I get home, I promise. Just take a hottie bottle to organ practice in the meantime OK?

Dolly’s Mittens

Once upon a time there was a girl with a beautiful and unusual name which was frequently mispronounced, muddled up with her surname, and laid out before her in the garbled greeting of 'Doll'.

Her devoted friends and colleagues quickly announced their intention to rechristen her Dolly, for which she has yet to forgive us.

Anyway, dear reader, Dolly had a tale of woe and chilliness; as the mornings got colder and frostier, she found that when driving to work her littlest finger on each hand also got colder and frostier, and ever so slightly blue.

She thought of gloves, but wanted to maintain a good grip on the wheel. She thought of fingerless mittens, but then her finger would still get cold. It seemed she was destined to a lifetime of cold little fingers for twenty minutes every morning, until one day, another friend and colleague suggested that 'we' could knit finger warmers.

And the knitter took up the challenge, and set forth over the weekend with a quest for finger warmers, preferably in hot pink, and please with a mitten string to go through her coat sleeves and hold the fingers on.

The knitter was intrepid, the knitter was a little bit crazy, and the knitter had nothing better to do over the weekend. She armed herself with the very gorgeous Manos Wool/Silk blend in a hot fuchsia pink, a set of 3.5mm DPNs and a plan.

You see, the knitter couldn't stop at just little finger warmers, even with a mitten string, and so she came up with a plan for what henceforth shall be known as 'Dolly Mittens'.

They started, as the best plans often do, with someone else's pattern; this time the Maine Morning Mittens from Clara Parkes' Knitters' Book of Yarn. The Manos was a lot thinner than the suggested Noro Kureyon but with a drop in needle size and the addition of another pattern repeat, all things were hunkydory.

The knitter knit.


There were one or two tiny adjustments that the knitter made. When knitting the thumbs she picked up as many stitches as seemed sensible and knit for as long as seemed sensible before casting off. Secondly, and most importantly, when she came to the top of the mitt she put a buttonhole two rounds from the top opposite the thumb hole.

A buttonhole requires buttons, so our happy knitter turfed out her button tin over the conservatory table,

And identified three possible options for her purpose.

The butterflies, whilst not an exact colour match, won the day. The knitter put the butterflies to one side and cast on 12 sts in the round. She knit the k2, p1 pattern around and around and around until the resulting tube was a little shorter than her little finger, worked a round of k2tog, p1, and then a round of k2tog and ran the yarn through the remaining stitches.

Then she sewed the butterfly buttons to the little tubes - now quite clearly finger warmers - and chained a really long length of crochet mitten string with a loop at either end.

Et voila:

The loop on the mitten string hooked over the butterflies, keeping the finger warmers in place, just as promised.

And on the really cold days; the mitten string comes off, the mitten goes over the top.

And the butterflies pop through the buttonholes and out to the side to keep it all together.

And so the knitter presented the mittens to Dolly who entertained giggles of such great delight that the all seeing all powerful boss came over to see what the hilarity was all about. He announced to the assembled masses that he liked the colour (the one thing that the knitter had no involvement in). Is it very naughty of the knitter to consider knitting him pink mittens if his name should happen to fall into her lap as Secret Santa?

Dolly reports that she has nice toasty warms fingers now - and I had a lot of fun making them!

Moveable Goalposts

As of this morning, or possibly this lunchtime, I have finished the Christmas knitting that is required for Monday when we see one half of the family. Yippee!

To finish, by New Year's Day I need:

- 1 pair of plain socks
- 1 patterned sock
- the cuff of a patterned sock

.. and that's it. Totally do-able. I hope!

Today's output included a pair of Heathery Morning Mittens for my SIL in Scotland:


I had started these a little while ago, and finished incarnation one of mitten one last night when I needed the DPNs for something else. The original version had caused the yarn to pool really badly so I was knitting alternate rounds from each end of the ball to break it up. Incidentally that technique could win prizes for things most likely to break the knitter.

Only when I was finished did I realise that it was missing a pattern repeat on the width and was going to be too small. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.

Happily as you see, the proper pattern gives not unpleasant swirls, and knit up in no time.



The patterns is the Maine Morning Mitts from Clara Parkes' Knitters Book of Yarn and the yarn is Manos del Uruguay Classic Wool. I think the colour might be 7306 but I've no idea where I put the ball band. It came from K1 in Edinburgh though - Lulla choose it having admired and hankered after H's mittens so now she has some too. They will match her coat and hat very nicely as purple is rather her colour.

Just wait until she sees her socks!

PS - Mickey and Minnie are this year's holiday Christmas Decoration to add to the tree; it's a china ornament and rather cute, if a little heavy. We're just impressed that we got it home intact.

The order of the garter

Although it may appear as if I have fallen down a spinning rabbit hole to the abandon of everything else I am happy to report that this is not entirely the case. For one thing, spinning and trains are unlikely ever to mix.

I finished H's latest pair of socks; 'the socks that saw the Harlot'; on Thursday evening (yes, after I finished making the pretty handspun, did I mention that spinning leads to late nights?) and I discovered that although my husband will be unimpressed if I wake him up merely to show him knitting, waking him up by putting the second sock on his cold bare foot is acceptable wifely conduct. That or it is the true wonder of Shelridge Farms Ultra

As it was sunny this morning he agreed to pose for pictures:



Isn't it great to know that he has become sufficiently overwhelmed by the wool fumes in this house that "stand there while I take pictures of your feet please", is a perfectly normal request. Actually I asked for an artistic pose as well and I got...


... quasi-Tai Kwondo! It does show the sock beautifully so I can't fault it.

As you can see, this is a garter stitch heel and toe as an alternative to my usual vanilla sock pattern, inspired by the latest Rockin Sock Club pattern. To do the garter heel simple knit your normal top down sock until you get to the heel shaping. My sock is over 72 sts on 2.5mm needles; fifteen rounds of 2x2 rib and then sixty rounds of plain stocking stitch.

First, rearrange your stitches so that you have half your stitches plus 2 on one/two needles, and the rest sitting on the final needle. The needle with the larger number of stitches is holds the sts which will be used to form the heel. Knit across those stitches until the last stitch, then wrap and turn by bringing the yarn forward between the needles, slipping the last st across, putting the yarn to the back and slipping the stitch back again. This stitch hasn't been worked but it looks like it's wearing a scarf (apologies to anyone I just taught to suck eggs). Knit back across your heel stitches until the final stitch and wrap and turn again.

You then work back and forth knitting every row and every row stop one short of where you got to last time and wrap and turn. At some point you need to start working outwards again. If you started with an even number of sts then make sure you work until there are an even number of sts unwrapped in the middle of the heel (I use 10 but 8 or 12 would work just as well, it depends on how many sts you started with). If you started with and odd number of sts then use 11 (or 9 or 13), you see the idea.

Then knit until the first wrapped st, knit that st and wrap and turn the next one. Repeat as before, each time knitting the next wrapped st and wrapping the one after until you have only the outside two double wrapped sts. You do NOT need to knit the wraps in this method - and I find that it looks nicer without.

Then start knitting in the round again, when you come to the join I find the best trick is to knit the final wrapped stitch, then pick up the wraps and knit them with the next stitch. Similarly, when you work the final stitch of the top of the foot, pick up the wraps and knit them with that stitch. Finally, adjust the needles so that you can tell where the instep/sole divide is.

When you come to the toe simple repeat the heel, working with the stitches on the top of the foot and when you are finished, kitchener stitch the toe to the sole of the sock and you're done. It's a nice variation on an otherwise plain sock.

As a commute without knitting is unimaginable I stuck a pin in the stash and came out with this:


Manos Pure Wool in a colour which might seem surprisingly tame for me but which has such rich deep colours that I couldn't resist it. In an effort to provide conclusive proof that knitting controls, if not the universe, at least the weather, I noticed that it was getting a little parky in the mornings and cast on a pair of fingerless mittens on Friday morning. It has been increasingly warm and sunny ever since.

Unfortunately, I have to report that it will rain tomorrow because I have finished them:


These are the Maine Morning Mitts from Clara Parkes' Knitters Book of Yarn; (and also available as a free download) a pattern written deliberately to show off beautiful coloured singles yarns like Manos and Noro Kureyon. I think we can say that it succeeded.

As you may have noticed from the picture above, these mittens have been decreed to be unisex. So should they be for me


Or for H?



He is bigger than me, so I think I know who would win a tug of mitten.