Mitten madness

I finished my first Briscoe Mitten. I think I need to reblock it, though, because the pattern is a bit distorted. Anyway, here are photos:





















The good news with these guys is that now that I've re-designed them, you can really see the Star of David. The bad news is that you can really see the Star of David. My mittens make a somewhat more emphatic religious statement than I'm ordinarily in the habit of making. I'm not usually a person who wears her Jewishness on her sleeve, so to speak, or really any other part of her body. Also, I'm thinking about doing the second mitten in orange, in keeping with the Irish theme, and I'm worried that people will mistake it for some sort of statement of support for Israeli settlers. I think that in the future, I will attempt to be a little less literal-minded when I design mittens. Who knew that stranded colorwork could be such a cultural and political minefield!

I've also knitted some toddler mittens for the KFO service project.


We're knitting things for members of the Mattaponi Native American tribe in Virginia. I did these little mittens in Paton's Kroy. I really liked this yarn. In fact, I think it may be my favorite yarn that's available at big-box craft stores like Michael's. It doesn't feel like plastic, and "crayon" is a nice unisex colorway that is great for kids' stuff. I plan to make at least two more pairs of kids' mittens with it: another one for the KFO project and a baby pair for the forthcoming baby who I am too superstitious to name here.

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.

Things I Have Learned from my Briscoe Mittens

So in this episode of "Emily blathers self-indulgently in her blog," we return to our regularly scheduled knitting program. Today I am busy lamenting the fact that I like about a zillion patterns in the new Twist Collective, which requires you to purchase each pattern separately, whereas I'm not crazy about anything in the forthcoming Interweave Knits, which only requires you to shell out once for the whole magazine full of patterns. I am really fond of Twist Collective's Postwar Mittens and Vivian Cardigan, but I'm not sure that I can justify spending $6-7 on a pattern at this stage of my life. I might throw caution to the wind and go ahead and buy the mitten pattern, even though I should be saving that money for things like rent.

It has come to my attention, by the way, that my mitten-knitting fixation is actually part of a larger mitten trend. I'm not sure how I became trendy without realizing it. I think that this is an extension of the sock knitting trend: people are getting a little bored of socks, and mittens are a similarly small project. Personally, I never really got into socks, and I vastly prefer knitting mittens. Mostly, I love stranded colorwork, and I'm not up to doing stranded socks. Stranded knitting has no give at all, so stranded socks would have to fit perfectly in order not to fall down or be too tight. I knit for fun, not to torture myself, so that's not going to happen.

So anyway, my Briscoe Mittens are progressing. Here's where they are right now.
Back:

Palm:

Looking at those pretty, pretty Postwar mittens has reminded me why people generally knit things from actual commercial patterns, rather than making patterns up themselves. Let's just say that my improvised stranded pattern cannot hold a candle to such loveliness. However, knitting these mittens has been educational. Here are some things I've learned from my Briscoe Mittens.

1. If I'm going to knit two-color mittens, I should pick one dark color and one light one. I decided that I would do two contrasting, but equally dark colors, so I've got a medium green and a medium orange. This is driving me nuts. I don't feel like there's enough contrast, and I think the pattern gets lost. I can do monochromatic mittens, like these still-unfinished purple ones:

(Those were the first mittens I ever tried to knit, before I knew anything about mitten construction. I think they've been abandoned. Maybe I'll frog the yarn and knit a real pair of mittens.) Or I can do ones that have a bright or dark color and use white or cream for the contrast color. No more of this orange and green silliness. If I'm going to spend twenty hours producing a pretty pattern, I want people to be able to see it.

2. Stranded knitting is a lot more fun when you have a straight-forward repeating geometrical pattern. My mitten has two parts: a nice, geometrical palm and a fancy, evil Star of David on the back. The palm is really fun and easy: each row has a standard repeat. For instance, my next row will be knit three stitches orange, knit three stitches green, repeat all the way across the row. Easy! The Star of David motif isn't standardized or easy in any way. The only way to know what to do is to look at the chart for each stitch as you're knitting. This is getting really tiresome. In the future, I will not try to draw fancy yarn pictures with my stranded knitting and will instead stick with repeating and geometrical.

Briscoe Mittens

After a brief, post-Firefly-swap, election-related knitting hiatus, I have something new on the needles. I've improvised a mitten pattern. (I'm not quite ready to call myself a designer, so I'm going to say "improvised," rather than "designed.") They're orange and green mittens with a Star of David motif, so I've named them Briscoe Mittens, after Robert Briscoe, an Irish Jew who fought in the Irish war of independence, served as a member of the Irish parliament for forty years, and was the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin. I realize this is a really obscure reference. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a bit of a geek.

It turns out, upon googling, that Robert Briscoe's son, Ben Briscoe, is still very much around, and apparently he's got an email account. I have a fantasy that he's going to contact me and tell me that his father hated knitting and that I should name my mittens after someone else. In that case, I'll call them Leopold Bloom Mittens, but I like Briscoe Mittens better, just because I'll take an obscure reference over a mainstream one any day.

Anyway, it's too early for good pictures, but here's the back so far:



And here's the palm: