One more Briscoe Mitten Chart

I couldn't sleep last night, and I had an insomnia-induced revelation about my Briscoe mittens. Specifically, I realized that it was a bad idea to stack two stars on top of each other. Rather than do that, I should center one star in the middle of the mitten and put some other sort of design element above and below it. I hopped over the Latvian mitten chart site and found a nice, vaguely shamrock-y looking flower to borrow and tried my hand at a new chart. Here it is:



And here's the thumb:



That's it. I'm done. I bought some Louet Gems Fingering at Annie and Co. the other day, and I am casting on today or tomorrow. These are my NaKniMitMo (that's National Knit Mittens Month, to the unitiated) project, so they have to be done by Feb. 1st. Wish me luck!

ETA: You know what's sad? Since I posted this, I have tweaked and reposted the picture twice. Would that I were this conscientious about my dissertation!

Greetings from Sunny New York!

Actually, it's raining in New York. But greetings anyway. I'm not doing anything very cool and New York-like in New York, because I'm holed up trying to write a stupid chapter of my stupid dissertation. Also, the whole reason that I decided to come to New York to write this chapter is so that I'd have access to the New York Public Library, and it turns out to be temporarily closed due to a mysterious lead paint emergency. That's actually not true: the building is open. You just can't get to any books, apparently for lead-paint-related reasons. I can't say that makes any sense to me, but I personally don't want to be the cause of anyone getting lead poisoning, so I'm not going to complain.


So anyway, my big news is that I re-charted my Briscoe mittens in an attempt to make the Star of David look more like a Star of David. I broke some basic rules of stranded colorwork here: I've got some pretty big blocks of a single color, which is supposed to be a no-no. But I've gotten pretty good at the stranded thing, and I'm fairly confident that I can get away with it. Anyway, here's my new chart.

I'm almost done with my first pair. My next big project, I think, is going to be Autumn Rose. It's going to take a while for the yarn for that to arrive from KnitPicks, though, so in the meantime I think I'm going to try a pair of my new and improved Briscoe Mittens. I think I may do them as part of the NaKniMiMo (that's National Knit Mittens Month) Knit-Along, although I don't appear to really need a knit-along in order to knit mittens.

Mitten-y

Ok, my first mitten is done. I'm not super happy with these, but I'm going to finish the second one, because my hands are cold and I need some mittens. Here are some photos:



And here's a close-up of my only marginally successful attempt to knit a stranded star of David:


I'm sort of tempted to try that again, this time with a higher-contrast color combination and some other modifications. I'll see how I feel about that after my second mitten is done.