Thursday, February 7, 2013

Flipping Mittens

I almost finished knitting the pair of Dire Wolf Mittens as a birthday gift. I actually DID finish the 2nd mitten, then discovered that I made a beautiful mistake in it. You'll see how I made the mistake when I detail my modifications.

I wanted to make these Dire Wolf Mittens as "flip top" mittens (where someone can stick out their fingers w/o needing to take them off), because the recipient uses his hands quite a bit and needs the dexterity of the fingers.
  1. Around line 40, I placed the 30 palm stitches onto waste yarn
  2. Knit the last 30 stitches
  3. Cast on another 30 stitches using a provisional cast on with a crochet hook
  4. Completed the mittens per pattern.
  5. Flip Top Mittens

  6. Put the bottom stitches on the smaller needles (US3/ 3.25mm) and knit ribbing upwards (and sewed the edges to the mitten
  7. Put the top stitches on the bigger needles (US 6 / 4.0) and knit the pattern DOWNWARD (lines 39, 38, 37, 36, 35), then.
  8. Swapped to 3.0mm beacuse I wanted something a LITTLE tighter so the gap wouldn't gape....and knit 1x1 ribbing for a few rows and attached them to the edges of the mittens.

Untitled 

When I was finished, I had 3 sets of needles lying on my desk. I immediately cast on for the 2nd pair of mittens. I grabbed the US 3s to start the ribbing. When I was finished with the ribbing, I grabbed the other set of needles and started knitting the main body

Guess which ones I grabbed? Ayup...the other set of US 3s.... I noticed that I was a tad bit tighter in my knitting, but I attributed that to the tension of the yarn and made a conscious effort to be loose...never considering my needles.

Oy. When everything was done and I finished weaving in all the ends, the actual stitches/inch gauge wasn't that far off...but the row count was...by almost 0.5 inches. Such a wonderfully beautiful mistake. *sigh*

I looked at the needles lying on my desk, and saw that the US 6s were on very short cables, which wasn't the ones I was using when I was knitting the body. I feel wonderfully "pretty".

A friend suggested that I knit another 2 mittens to match both sizes. I'm not sure I'm up for that, but I do have to knit a CORRECT mate to the first mitten that I knit. Luckily, the recipient's bday isn't for another month so I have time.

Oy...

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