This is my Glorious Mitten. I finished it on Sunday night and brought it in to hang up at the store on Monday. It's made with Manos del Uruguay's new SILK BLEND DK yarn that feels absolutely mesmerizing with luscious colours. (The picture on the right of a skein of colour 3109 shows the colours much truer than my feeble photographic attempt.)Now the problem is that I love the mitten so much, I want to write the pattern out to share it with all of you, and of course, to make a second one. Unfortunately, I was so excited and enamoured with the yarn as I was knitting with it, I couldn't drag myself away long enough to grab a pen and paper to keep track of what I was doing.
"Okay," says I tonight, as I'm trying to count stitches and rows from the original, " 47 stitches is 23x2 + 1 for the beginning of the thumb gussett." Good! I remember that much. And I remember that I increased up to 17 stitches for the thumb, but I'll be darned if I remember if I did it every 4 rows, or every 2 rows. As for the decreases at the top, all I know is that I tried the thing on and when it was to the top of my little finger I started decreasing (I think that I remember calculating that I needed 20 rows to have enough to make it to the top of my hand. )
As you can see, I'll probably have to reknit the whole thing, just so I can get the particulars.
The interesting thing about this exercise is that I NEVER reknit stuff. I seldom rip back to change something unless it is completely non-salvagable. Usually my tension swatches are sleeves that give me a good fabric to measure from when determining how many stitches that I need for the body of a sweater. I've become an expert at turning errors in measuring, stitch or colour patterning into "design features". Yet I'm prepared to make 2 more of these mitts - not so much because I want to wear them, or I feel an overwhelming sense that I need to share "my" mitten pattern with the world, but because I loved using the yarn so much. It was a true seduction. It caressed my hands as I was knitting with it; I didn't ever want to put it down.
Now you have to realize that I spend my whole day (when I'm not working on bookkeeping, or at the computer, or bringing the recycling to the drop off, or blah, blah, blah...) feeling yarns. I feel lots of yarns and I knit with lots of yarns. That's why I was so intrigued with my reaction to this yarn.
I began by making a stocking stitch swatch before I realized what a waste it would be not to show it off in something that people could try on. Then I made almost a whole mitten on 53 stitches and 4 mm needles before I realized that I didn't like it, it was too loose. It would have fit a man, and this was a Glorious Mitten, it needed to fit a woman's hand. So I got my Addi Turbo 3.25 mm needles to create a firm fabric to keep the wind out, and I reknit the whole thing enjoying every stitch. And I don't feel at all upset that it's pretty useless in it's present solo state. It's a Glorious Mitten!
I almost wonder if I purposely didn't write down what I was doing so I would have to do it all over again - twice.
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