Amy Knits Socks

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…

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.