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.