Saturday, January 7, 2012

Mitten maddness

Ok, take 2: I was writing this post when I hit a key a froze the screen and had to restart the computer and lost what I had written. Anyway, I decided last week I wanted to knit myself a pair of mittens. But I wanted mittens I could shovel snow in and get wet. I bought a very very nice well made pair of alpaca mittens in October at the sheep and wool festival. I do not want my alpaca mittens to get wet or felt or anything. They are the warmest mittens I have so far. So as we are in a small heat wave of 35-40 degrees for a few days, I wanted to get a jump on knitting mittens before the next snowfall comes.

My yarn store had a sale today on yarn I wanted. I wanted Rowan Purelife yarn. This is special yarn. The wool is from British sheep thus the British yarn! My skeins have Shetland Moorit, Masham and Suffolf sheep fleeces in it. I have not heard of any of these breeds before. The yarn is not baby soft but for a pair of rustic feltable mittens they are perfect. I want to let nature felt the mittens naturally. I could do it myself but I'm to lazy. I read somewhere that mittens that are felted are water resistant and warm. We shall see.

I made 1 practice mitten awile ago with Red Heart yarn and liked how it came out except for my crappy knitting. I decided to go rogue and try and adjust the pattern for the thicker yarn. I decided to not change anything. I used worsted weight for my practice mitten and this is the next step up in thickness. I figured the extra thickness would reduce or eliminate the bagginess and looseness my practice mitten had.

The problem is I wanted to use 2 circualr needles. I do not have 2 in size 5. So I decided to try and knit them on straight needles. The pattern calls for it to be knit on circular needles. We will see if it will work. I should know soon if it will. Why does knitting have to be so difficult? They are just mittens. I will keep you posted.

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