Thursday, September 21, 2006

Mittens Pattern Available

The Fitted Mittens pattern is now available on the Loom Knitting website.



I first started on these over the summer. I was playing with the new long looms, and developed a BBQ mitt using cotton yarn. I wanted the thumb of the mitt to correspond to where the thumb is on the hand, especially for grabbing hot packets of food. I even played with paper patterns for a thumb gusset. I haven't finalized that pattern -- my husband and daughter both had a number of design change requests -- but I did come up with the idea to knit the thumb as part of the mitten body, instead of it being an appendage that gets attached to the side. And I incorporated that thumb design into this mitten pattern.

What I especially like about these mittens is that the tips for the thumb and fingers are rounded to fit the contour of the hand. (I like doing things like figuring the proportions of the short rows to accomodate different finger lengths.) There aren't any large 'air pockets' with these mittens. They fit well, your hands don't swim in them, there's no bulky gathering, and you could wear silk glove liners with them for added warmth. I'm actually not much of a mittens person, but these are so comfortable that I'll be wearing them while driving in the bitter cold MN winter this year.

When I first started refining this pattern, it took me about three hours to knit a mitten. I have knit so many of these, both to perfect details and to test the five different sizes, that now I can do one in about an hour. These would be great charity knitting items. I can't wait to teach this pattern for my Mittens class at Michaels in early November.

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