Wednesday, January 2, 2013

my first fo of the year

(FO = finished object in knitter-speak)

And I am proud to say it is not a scarf! It is a pair of fingerless mitts. That mitt pattern that I learned in the Estonian stitch knitting class back in September was still nagging at me.



I loved the colors of the sample I knit during the class, but I had used smaller needles to suit the yarn I brought and it ended up painfully tight. I didn't have enough yarn in those colors to reknit it larger, plus I wanted to see what would happen if I used a graduated yarn for one of the yarns instead.

I cast on Christmas Day morning, when amazingly enough I was the only one up for a good amount of time before the boys roused themselves. Yet another sign of things to come...


I have gotten to a point with my knitting skills that if something doesn't work for me, I can usually come up with a way to alter it to make it more to my liking. What an awesome force! I ended up re-working the number of stitches and the way the thumb-hole was constructed to produce a pair of mitts that worked quite well for my hands. It was a bit of ripping out and redoing until I got exactly what I wanted, but I got there eventually! I wove in the ends last night and wore them all day today. I felt super-smart every time I looked down at them, especially the way the colors matched up almost exactly.



While I am on the subject of Estonian knitting: if you ever have the chance to take a class with Merike Saarnit, who taught that class and designed the mitt pattern, don't miss it! She will have you thinking about knitting stitches in a whole new way. She is teaching classes at Vogue Knitting Live in NYC later this month. Hopefully I will see her to show off my new mitts in person.

1 comment:

  1. Totally LOVE those mitts!! Awesome color changes.

    My kids were up bright and early for Christmas, but that's pretty much the only day of the year that that happens.

    blessings,
    pam

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