I have been wanting to get to these patterns inTerri Shea’s book,  SELBUVOTTER: Biography of a Knitting Traditionfor the longest time it seems.  It’s actually hard to choose one, especially since she tells you how to mix and match and adapt the patterns to different yarns – then I have WAY too many possibilities.  That situation usually ends up with me just (figuratively) spinning.

So, I did that for a while and then decided when I got yarn for it I’d just choose one that’s already in the book and do it.  This is called “NHM#3″.    It looks like rose buds and leaves to me.  Now I’m kind of wishing I’d gotten a color (like a rosy color for the design) rather than just stick with the neutrals, but there’s always next time.

Here’s the palm (click to make picture bigger):

You can see the waste yarn at the thumb opening here. It seems like it’s going to work well.  The book tells you to put these stitches onto a piece of waste yarn and then cast on the same amount and knit those.  That often ends up kind of sloppy for me, so I chose to just knit onto the waste yarn twice.

I have to wait until I’m done with the mitten to come back and pick up those stitches and take the yarn out – so the suspense continues!

This is day 3′s progress.  I only have time to knit at night during the week, so not too bad.  It’s not like anyone NEEDS these anytime soon, what with Spring springing up all around here, so there’s no great hurry, and I’m enjoying the process.

In other news – my other skein yarn for the Seaman’s scarf has arrived at my LYS.  So, I’m seeing a weekend jaunt to Sonora coming up soon, and the other half of the Seaman’s scarf.  Hopefully, the dyelots will be close enough that I won’t need to resort to my own devices to make it come out “matching.”

I have a dyepot, and I know how to use it…just sayin’.

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.