Smittens

Thank you all for your kind words about my succulent…interest (it's not a problem if it's just plants, right?)

I've been at knitting loose ends for a few months now, so besides a couple doilies (they're like popcorn, I swear), I haven't been feeling like much of anything. Now I've gone and found myself a new little obsession. The love monkey has dubbed these my smittens, because I can't seem to put them down.

These started as an extended swatch on some entirely different yarn. Well, more like a test mitten than a swatch, without the cuff. I needed to figure out what needle size to use and whether I liked the fabric and blah blah blah, which was about the amount of fun I was having knitting them. That is to say, not very much. It was probably a combination of me being out of practice with stranded knitting, and not really enjoying the colors, the yarn was a 2-ply and not particularly bouncy, and I never much enjoy swatches anyway.

Then I decided that no way would the test mitten fit a 9 year old and so I stopped the mitten swatch and picked out new colors for the 7-year-old instead. The 7-year-old likes gold. The 9-year-old is fond of kind of a turquoise-y blue. Except I think I was wrong and this is turning out plenty big to fit a 9-year-old.

I am very enamored of the dark, saturated blue against the gold (this picture is about the truest to color) . The gold has color prominence, by the way. I started out with the blue, but it contrasts so highly that some of the gold singletons were getting lost. The yarn is Madelinetosh super wash fingering (different bases, but it's close enough) and yes, I would have dyed my own except I didn't have anything on hand dyed up in those colors and I had store credit at a local yarn store and INSTANT GRATIFICATION. Also, I got to walk through the Castro on Pink Saturday for this yarn.

These are selbuvotter, and the pattern is from Norway (!) from a pattern booklet which was an impulse internet buy several years ago. #9 Barnevott, from Rauma LVS-5, Selbustrikk if you're interested. It came with an English translation, but honestly you don't really need much but the chart and a passing knowledge of mittens.