To go along with the socks, my mum encouraged me to make a matching mitten pattern. The first mitten went quickly, as I was figuring out the pattern, but I’ve been struggling to work up interest in knitting the second, so that one took forever. It’s finally done though, and I’m really happy with how the pair turned out. There were only a few modifications from what I made to what I wrote up.
We determined that the sock pattern was pretty stretchy, so I decided to do an afterthought thumb, instead of trying to figure out how to work gusset increases into the pattern. It means that there’s a bit of an odd stretch at the thumb, but the mitten still fits fairly well. The stretchyness of the pattern also means that the gauge/sizing is very flexible on these mittens-I knit the small, but my mom knit the medium and it fit both her and my dad (mum’s hands and mine are the same, and dad’s are definitely bigger). I never really trust the ‘one size fits all’, but this actually does an okay job of fitting many. Since I was doing an afterthought thumb, I wanted to make sure that the pattern continued up the thumb as seamlessly as possible, and I think I succeeded. The feature I really like about this pattern is that the cable along the side continues up and over the top of the fingers/thumb. It turns out to be a really hard feature to capture in a photo (and maybe isn’t the most noticeable in real life either), but I really like that touch since otherwise I would have had to come up with a graceful way to end all the other design elements.
In other news, both the sock pattern and the mitten pattern are currently in the test knitting process. They’re at the stage where the super speedy testers are all done (with no major problems! Hooray!), but the rest of the testers are still knitting along. We (mum is helping me run it) gave them until the 30th to finish up, which currently seems like forever from now… After the test, there’s another wait period before Melissa from knitting the stash releases her farm-to-skein yarn and my two patterns, along with a third hat pattern, so I don’t know when this pattern will actually be released yet! Guess I just need to write up another pattern to keep myself occupied…