Sunday, March 10, 2013

Another project - finished!

Annnnd they're done!

Just finished the fingerless mitts that are a gift for Laura's birthday.  When she and Blake were over a couple weekends ago to do a shared celebration of our birthdays, I told her my gift to her would be to let her pick out the yarns/colors and a pattern (with limitations) and I would knitt up her gift.  After looking over the other colors, she went with these three, which I'd just happened to position together without trying to find ones that looked good together.


These are Madelinetosh Tosh DK in (top to bottom) Citrus, Rosewood and Bark.  They all look very orangey in these pictures due to the lighting.  At times Bark seems like a dark brown, other times very green.


 I've been taking pictures of the finished projects so I can go back and compare, look at notes I made, etc.  This has been coming in handy - like for Laura's mitts, I didn't have her here in person to test the size, but she'd tried on previous mitts I'd knit, and we noted that it could lose about an inch of width when laid down flat - so that's almost 2" from AROUND the mitts.


I figured using a DK weight yarn for these guys (instead of the worsted weight from the previous mitts) would take care of some of this size-reduction, and instead of 44 stitches cast on, I went with 36.  That's made for a pretty snug finished object on my hands (as seen in these pics), so hopefully it's a good size for her without cutting off circulation!


Here's hoping she likes the color banding I went with.  Rather than the same width for each band, I went random on the first mitt, just jotting down notes so I could keep the second mitt the exact same.  I really like how the narrow orange/Citrus band wraps around the base of the thumb.


It seems you can't try to take pictures of something around here without someone else getting jealous and wanting in the picture!


Laura said she thought the colors she picked out would be great to wear when she's at a Cleveland Browns game.  Uh oh - that Bark color turns kinda green in the daylight!!


I had a goof up when finishing the thumb gusset on the first mitt, and reduced by two stitches too many.  Turns out this makes the upper palm area have a nice fit, but it also meant I had to reduce by two more when I got to the ribbing near the fingers so I could have a total number of stitches divisible by 4.  I'm glad Laura's hands are smaller than mine!


Here's what the mitts look like right now - stew!  Gross!  In fact, I need to wrap this up and get them out of their soaking water...


3 comments:

Joe said...

So jealous you can do this. Love the gloves!

Jeph said...

Joe - you're so freakishly talented with everything else you do, I KNOW this is something you could pick up in no time! Honest - if *I* can do it, you can! Promise!

anne marie in philly said...

very nice present! excellent handwork!