Endpaper Update

I am officially having a Bad Day. I think that the universe sends me into Total Vertigo Meltdown occasionally just to remind me how nice it is not to have vertigo. So anyway, I'm having one of those days. I also suspect that I'm getting a migraine, because there are some flashing lights that don't seem to be coming from any actual light source. Exciting.

But I am not blogging to whine about my various boring medical issues. I am blogging because I have made some progress on my slightly-altered Endpaper Mitts. See:



Pretty, no? I'm pretty happy with my random re-design.

Yet more mitten-y goodness

For the "all about me" swap, I made my partner Endpaper Mitts. She loves pink, so I knit her extremely pink Endpaper Mitts. I forgot to take a picture of the finished pair, but here's the first one, on a mitten blocker that I made out of a plastic placemat:


The yarn is Cascade Heritage in fuchsia and cotton candy. I have a bunch of yarn left over, and I really like the pattern, so I've decided to knit a second pair for myself. However, I can't quite bring myself to knit exactly the same pattern twice in a row, so I've tweaked the stranded motif a little bit. I borrowed again from this gallery of Latvian mitten patterns and came up with this design:



It's pretty close to the original, to be honest, but hopefully it's different enough to keep things interesting.

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.

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.

Itty bitty little projects

I made a hat for the Knitters for Obama chemo cap drive:

It's a Coronet in Cashsoft Aran. I really like the pattern, and the yarn suits it, but I'm not sure it's a great combination for a chemo cap. It's really warm, which makes it perfect for outdoor wear this time of year, but I think it might be a bit too heavy to wear indoors or in the summer.

I also made some not-entirely-successful Saartje's booties. I'm too superstititious to say who they're for, but here's a picture:


I either had some gauge issues or added a row to one of them, because the one on the left is a lot bigger than the one on the right. Luckily, it takes about an hour to knit one of these suckers, so I think I can churn out another one and hope that it's the same size as one or the other of them. The yarn is Louet Gems fingering. The blue is the leftovers from my Blue Sun mittens. I'm surprised more people haven't used gems for these guys, because it's machine washable, and the colors are really vibrant.

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!