posts tagged: mittens

arched gusset mittens

Apparently I spent this past winter knitting baby/child items that were designed by Purl Soho, because I also decided to knit up a pair of the Arched Gusset Mittens one day, using some fingering-weight yarn that was laying around. Mostly I was looking to learn the construction of the mittens before casting on an adult-sized pair. When the first one was done, it was so cute and had used so little yarn that I made a match.

arched gusset mittens from purl soho | pepperknit

Looking at them later I simply could not fathom what size child would fit into what I’d made. I just don’t have any concept of the size of children’s hands! But my friend Christy she thought they’d work for her little girl next winter so I happily gave them to her.

 

macro mitts for emily

I knit my first pair of Macro Mitts by Lauren Osborne years ago, and they are my most-worn mittens every winter. Every time my friend Emily saw them, she’d make it very clear how much she wanted her own pair. It’s not as if she couldn’t just knit them herself, but I’d always said that I would make her a pair, though I never got around to it.

But just a week ago, Emily announced she’s moving across the country, from Queens to San Diego. And even though she will have limited times to wear them in San Diego, I knew I had to knit her a pair as a going away present. Of course, we were having dinner on Saturday night and I had this brilliant idea Friday afternoon. But we had nothing but a marathon of Justified Season 4 on the docket so I managed it!

macro mitts | pepperknit

I even knit all 4 Latvian Braids. (I omitted the top ones on my own pair, because I detest knitting those braids!) If that doesn’t show how important this gift was, I don’t know what does.

finished in 2012

I almost didn’t do a wrap-up this year, but I just realized that I have done one every year for many many years now and why should I suddenly stop? First up, my knitting accomplishments for the year:

finished knits

Who knew I was able to complete so much while at the same time whining about not being “able to knit” because of my thumb pain? There really isn’t such a dearth of knitting, is there? There are two missing projects: one is a design I did for a book that’s not coming out for a while yet so I probably shouldn’t show it to you anyway. I also knit a hat for a work giveaway that I didn’t document at all. Those coffee cup cozies were a little thing I did for Knit Simple magazine. They assigned me cozies, and I couldn’t decide which pattern to submit, so I showed Editor in Chief Carla Scott all of them, and she said “yes! we’ll do all three!” Ha.

I like that you can see how I used the same yarn for my Buckwheat as the hat for Carol; I should start making hats out of all my leftover yarn! Thanks again are due to Caro Sheridan for the photo shoots we were able to do this year, for Buckwheat, the Bulky Topper, and the green hat!

I’d declared 2012 “the year of the quilt” and I wasn’t wrong. It was definitely a year of sewing. With my injured thumb, it was far less painful to sew, so our entire dining room area was pretty much unusable as a place of eating. (“Be careful! Don’t spill on that!” gets old fast.) Here are all my quilty endeavors (plus an embroidery project that I never blogged):

year in quilt

That lion embroidery? I made that for my dear friend’s baby; because mom and I met while taking yoga together 6 days a week for a few years, I added “simhasana” to the embroidery (the Sanskrit for lion pose) and stitched the little lion’s tongue sticking out (like you do in the pose). Just a little touch of something personal, and a really cute result. The one in the lower right has yet to be shot in daylight, but that will come soon, and the one in the middle on the bottom actually is basically finished and has been in use but has never been photographed! I need to get on that. The quilting that I did this year was mostly on my tiny machine, but I did do a mix of machine and hand quilting on the star quilt that hasn’t been blogged. I feel really confident in my skills as a quilter now, too, so I’m really happy with what I did this year.

Earlier in the year the last of my bees finished up, so I have some bee blocks in my catalog of finished stuff:

year in bees

I wasn’t good at documenting these, actually. And in fact, I may have never fully finished the Dresden plate in the bottom middle, but I don’t remember where I put the blocks-in-progress! (This is what happens when I actually clean the apartment.) I’m so glad that I participated in a total of 3 bees. You really gain so much skill and knowledge so quickly. I know that bees are tricky—I mean, you’re trusting other people to have the same standards and skills as you—but I also enjoyed being exposed to so many different kinds of blocks and ways of approaching a quilt. Actually, in my finished quilt mosaic are two of the bee quilts that I had made: the picnic blanket came from my Twitter Bee, and the stars (the unfinished one in the mosaic) was from KBeeC, a bee among my KBC friends. The third bee, the Solid 6, comprises most of my finished bee blocks in the mosaic above… But I picked a block for everyone to make that it turns out I really don’t like very much. I’m torn as to what to do with the blocks that were made for me, so I’m sitting on them until the right idea comes along.

What’s up for this year? Well, the month of January is going to be basically a rest from quilting. I’ve got two business trips, we have houseguests, and I’m just, I must confess, tired. I like having a clear dining room table! I’m enjoying just sitting on the couch watching TV when I get home—plus lately I’m so busy I get home late from work. But I’m sure when I’m back from TNNA things will come back—I intend this to be the year of sewn clothing! (Something that, despite having taken classes on the subject more than once, I am still quite intimidated by.) But I still have a bunch of quilt ideas swirling around in my brain that I can’t wait to make real. There will always be knitting, too, of course, don’t worry. Just this morning I bound off on a long-suffering project—stay tuned!

year of the dragon!

Try to look at these mittens and not smile. I dare you. There’s something lighthearted, almost laugh-out-loud funny about them, in my opinion, and knitting them was just as fun as, I hope, they will be to wear.

I made these dragon mitts for Pamela Wynne, the only friend I know who can pull off mismatched mittens with dragons on them. I placed the Noro (both Kureyon and Taiyo) exactly where I wanted it to get just the right color transitions. I had to tweak the pattern, which I found on Ravelry, to accommodate my gauge and Pam’s hands. It was kind of a lot of work for something that I had hoped would simply make her laugh.

But I hope they make her laugh every time she puts them on, in cold winters in Michigan.

Details, for posterity: The gray is the fabulous Universal Deluxe Worsted in a dark charcoal gray; the yarn is something like a “dupe” of Cascade 220 and held up great to some, ahem, frogging (I had knit an entire right mitt but decided I needed to go down a needle size). The pink-to-orange mitt is in Noro Taiyo, and the green one is Noro Kureyon. I used very very partial skeins of both colors but luckily was able to get just what I wanted out of them (the Taiyo had some black-and-white sections that would have been a travesty in these mitts!).

Knit about 7 inches long and 7 inches around, with this worsted yarn on size 3 needles. Got decent at twisting the floats, and added a lot more dots of color so that my floats weren’t as long. I worked the thumb gussets as colorwork but finished off the thumbs plain and duplicate stitched the color. It was actually my first time working duplicate stitch—I want to only do that forever more!

macro mitts

macro mitts!

There’s so much to catch you all up on—TNNA and VK LIVE—but I knit! I knit! And I can’t hold off on showing you my first finished object of 2011.

My online BFF Lauren has really taken off as a designer, and she’s always coming up with clever little projects, which is just my type of project. A while back she posted a picture of a WIP that had a thumb gusset to die for and an off-center motif that I loved so much, I volunteered to be a test knitter.