Since my Christmas present pair of socks was a year late, I determined that I needed to make matching fingerless mittens to go along with! I debated a fair amount how to go about the thumb, mainly if I should try to do it in pattern, with trees, or if I should do green and white stripes. I ended up carefully charting increases so that I could maintain some level of trees along the thumb, though the thumb trees are slightly smaller than the trees on the rest of the mitten. I think they turned out pretty cute!
I am really pleased with how these mitts turned out, though I had to block the thumbs a bit so that they weren’t way too small! I ended up sticking a large lip balm and a chopstick in each thumb while they were drying. After that, they seem to fit me pretty well, but I don’t know how big my hands are compared to others… One difference in these mitts is that there’s one extra pattern (tree) repeat in the palm as compared to the wrist. I measured my hand, and it’s about an inch smaller before the thumb as compared to after the thumb, so I’m reflecting that in the actual pattern. Thus, some of the increases for the thumb actually turn into body stitches, and stick around for the rest of the mitten. I’m really happy with how they fit me, and interested to see how they fit others.
I’ve decided to write up this mitten pattern, and I’m calling the size I knit ‘extra small’, though I don’t think I quite stuck to the gauge I’m writing up, so it isn’t quite clear exactly what size they are. These ones only have 18 stitches around on the thumb, but I’ve also figured out charts for 24 stitch and 30 stitch thumbs. I got my mum to test knit the ‘medium’ size, and she made full mittens (as compared to fingerless).
With the full mittens I had to figure out how to end the pattern. Normally I wouldn’t decrease as quickly, but I was limited in how I could get the decreases to fit with the tree motif, so the top of the mittens (and thumb) dive in pretty fast. I originally thought I’d go with a more standard stranded colorwork mitten top, but then I realized that some of the sizes have odd numbers of trees, which wouldn’t frame as nicely in those triangles that the standard mitten top has, since I didn’t really want half a tree. I’m quite pleased with how these decreases turned out on my mum’s sample, so I feel that I made the right choice.