I finished the thumb on the left mitten last evening. It taught me a couple of things – one was that the pattern for the palm isn’t just staggered to make it work for the palm – but if you don’t stagger the beginning white stitches the same for the thumb you get an interesting striping effect (the pictures above click to a bigger size). The thumb chart in the book is for the “public” side of the thumb, and the instructions say to just continue the same pattern as for the palm for the inside of the thumb. Apparently that meant even the edges? Why do I question these things?

So, knitting lesson number “bazillion” learned (hopefully).

I also messed up on the top pattern on the mitten (which I guess this picture does not really illustrate all that well – but it’s kind of a salt and pepper version of the bottom three patterns). I think I was talking to someone while knitting and miscounted somewhere.

I actually kind of like it – but I’m not hopeful I’ll be able to repeat it on the right hand.

These knit up to the size stated on the pattern – a lady’s small – my hands are probably a men’s medium or a lady’s large, so these are for gifting purposes, and pretty much just the fun of making them.  They are fascinating and fun.  This mitten took me six evenings from start to finish, and I don’t knit all evening with tiny needles, just maybe for an hour or two at most.

The “thumb trick” worked great. I’ll be using that one again. You DO have this book, right?  Thumb trick “Unvented” here.

Well, almost.  I sort of ran out of yarn about halfway through the project.  I hate when that happens.  This one is called “Irling’s Half Diamond Seaman’s scarf,” and it is in Stahman’s Shawls and Scarves.  I’m making it from Cascade 220 – only one side will be from a different dye lot because I bought this yarn about a year ago and just now got around to using it…AND apparently it takes more than one skein to do a scarf.  I bought it to make felted clogs with – and it was the color that I only needed one skein for – however, I have since used the other yarn on other projects, so decided to use THIS color for a nice neutral kind of “latte” colored scarf.  So, anyway, it gave us an excuse to take a drive over to Sonora to my LYS to see if they had any left.  Of course not!  But, they ordered some for me, so now I get to go BACK again.  See how that works?

While we were there this trip, I picked up some fingering weight yarn to start some selbuvotter mittens with.  These will be for a child, so it’s a good thing I ended up buying an acrylic.  I’m actualy pretty impressed with acrylic these days – although it still feels kind of “crunchy” to me, and I much prefer knitting with wool.  But, most of the time when you give young moms things that will shrink – they end up shrunk – so acrylic has its place.

They’re carrying Dream In Color yarn now, along with some alpaca yarn that I swear I’d marry if I could, but we have to keep things on the cheap these days since we also like to eat – so I restrained myself.

This should keep me busy for a while.

Oh!  And, the cat ladies were at Starbucks this weekend, so I got to drop off the mice.  They were most appreciative, and I was really glad I caught them.