Teeny tiny

I made tiny little mittens for my friends' baby. Here's a picture:


The pattern is Knituition's Nordic Baby Mittens, with a few minor design changes. First, I shrank them a little bit to fit a newborn, rather than a six-month-old. I cast on 36 stitches and increased up to 42, instead of the 40 and 46 in the original pattern. I also used Kitchner stitch on the top, instead of three needle bind-off. Finally, I designed my own stranded motif, which was necessary since I'm using fewer stitches than Knituition's pattern. Here's the chart I worked out:


Feel free to nab it if you decide to make your own teeny tiny baby mittens.

All About Meeeeeee

Through the Odd Ducks Swaps on Ravelry, I'm doing an "all about me" swap. The point of this thing is that everything you send to your partner should represent you in some ways: your background, your interests, your favorite things. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds. The stakes seem so high. What if I misrepresent myself? Even worse, what if I represent myself accurately and the results are ugly, tacky or boring? It's all so angst-worthy! Or maybe it's not, and I'm just the kind of person who can angst about anything. I wonder what swapable item would represent that personal characteristic.

So anyway, yesterday I got a lovely postcard from my partner indicating that she was stumped about what yarn and projects to send me and asking me to blog about what kind of things I would want. I'm happy to oblige, but I suspect this won't be too helpful.

So here's the thing about me and yarn. I'm not really a yarn person. For one thing, I'm in grad school and have been for my entire knitting career. This means that I need to be frugal. I tend, therefore, to use pretty standard, inexpensive, workhorse yarns. I use a lot of Cascade 220. I'm a big colorwork fan, and I mostly use Knitpicks Palette for that. But the issue isn't that I especially love Cascade 220 or Knitpicks Palette. It's that I'm cheap and I'm lazy and therefore when I go to buy yarn, I buy stuff that I know I like and can afford. Whenever I have branched out from my usual, boring yarn, I have been delighted to discover the interesting, new properties of interesting, new yarn. I knit a baby hat for my nephew in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport and thought that was awesome. I've knit a pair and a half of mittens in Louet Gems, and I love that. Hell, I loved the Paton's Kroy that I used for my mini mittens, because it was my first go round with self-striping yarn, which turns out to be awesome. So what I'm saying is that I'm easy to please. Whatever I get will be novel and interesting and awesome. I think you should do what the swap actually calls for, which is to get something that you like or use a lot and be confident that I will also like it.

As for a project, I can't help. I'm stumped on that, too! I will try to think of some stuff and get back to you.

In other news, I was planning to knit Autumn Rose, but the pattern is temporarily unavailable anywhere, so it's going to have to wait until the summer when the book gets reprinted. In the meantime, I'm swatching for a Yosemite in Knitpicks Comfy. I have no idea if I'm getting gauge, but so far I'm really liking the stitch pattern.