While planning my trip to Vogue Knitting in January, I decided that I needed to wear something I’d knit other than socks. So, I pulled out some Kamelsoft yarn that I’d purchased on sale and looked at patterns on ravelry til I found one that met my requirements:

• popular (over 100 projects)
• includes cables
• fingerless

For a couple of years, I’d planned to make myself fingerless mitts prior to my next NYC trip. I love that I waited until days before I flew out to Cast On. I finished these in 3 days and for once in my life, that included weaving in the ends. The mitts were completed and I’ve enjoyed wearing them in NYC, Colorado and to hockey games.

If you fancy a pair for yourself, Trenza Mitts by Susanna IC is a free pattern on ravelry. Enjoy!

So, there was a little more to the Lochness Mitts story than I might have first revealed. I knit the second mitt and was almost finished before I realized I’d done something really funky with the cabling very near the beginning. So funky that I started to wonder if I was getting enough water in the dry mountain air. I got some more water and stared at the mitt for a good thirty minutes analyzing my options before deciding to take a picture and then rip back to the ribbing. Instead of a lovely perfect line of interlinked rings, there was a complete perfectly round circle in the middle of a smooth interlinked chain. Think of the olympic rings if one of them was not interlocked, but was just kind of floating up against the others. In the end, all I could do was quietly watch the x-files movie and murmur “ribbit” to myself as I pulled out almost an entire mitt. How did I not notice the glaring mistake earlier? How did I somehow get SO off in my cabling? Could I have lived with it? Would the painter have noticed?

Probably. She is, after all, a rocket scientist.

A good friend of mine painted some yarn last year. Upon the painting of said yarn, I thought it was really beautiful and wanted to knit it up….so, I did the only thing any reasonable knitter would. I offerred to knit something for the painter with her yarn. Before you think that I’m generous of nature (yes, I know you’re really thinking I’m a tad tacky), I must admit that I was really lusting after the yarn. I had already named it. It is green and blue, so it made me think of the Lochness Monster in water. I called it the Lochness yarn for about 6 months before making my offer and getting her to bring me the pretty yarn. She joked quite a bit about when her gift would be done and I put her off all the while plotting the perfect mitts for the yarn her.

I looked through a lot of patterns. I wanted something with cables because she likes them almost as much as I do, but not too complicated so the yarn would be shown off. I cast on the Hermoine Mitts as practice, but that wasn’t moving me, so I frogged. I started to take a look at the Monkey Fingerless Mitts since I know the monkey socks look great in just about any yarn, but too many red flags made me continue my hunt:
red flag 1: the monkey socks are viral (15,000+ projects). These mitts have less than 50 projects.
red flag 2: there were two versions of the pattern that I might download. what does this mean? it’s a complete double rainbow?
red flag 3: the comments………did not bode well.

That’s when I sorted the patterns by popularity and settled on Mitt Envy. Surely, the kinks have been worked out after 1100+ projects. As is often the case with me, the third time’s the charm!

I surprised her with the first mitt on her birthday to make sure it fit and brought her the pair about a week later. I daresay she was pleasantly surprised by my turn around on the second mitt considering it took so long for the first one. It is nice to have a friend that appreciates the hand knits….and is willing to let me play with her one-of-a-kind hand-painted yarn! She’s a good egg!

Ps. Happy Leap Day, World!
Think of all the things you can get done this year now that you have a whole extra day!