November 21, 2011

Masterpiece Monday: Mittens Accomplished!

Ta-dah!  Rocket's Christmas mittens are complete!  They were less difficult than I expected and I think that they turned out pretty well; the thumb on one seems a little shorter than the other one, the stitch count is the same.


I think there is enough left for a hat, so I cast on yesterday in secret and will just see how things play out.

 
I don't think there will be enough left for a scarf, but if Rocket actually wears them more than once, at least I'll have some backup in case mending needs to be done.  That's probably wishful thinking, that they'll be worn until they are worn through--likely one will be lost in the under-the-bed abyss and the other one will accidentally go through the dryer and be fit for Barbie.  That's about how we roll around here.

I also cast on for a chullo for Scout #1 who, after I had already purchased a pattern that turned out to be a bit loopy in the realistic directions department and spent $25 bucks on yarn that he picked out himself and had re-knit the darned ear flaps into a loop for the hat portion about 4 times, tells me that he really liked that one at REI and we should just go there.  Ahhhhh, memories!


Well, I spent pretty much 4 hours on Sunday night trying to put the fair isle pattern that he wants into the hat.  For normal people who can multiply and divide, this is not a 4-hour endeavor; for me, it's a 4-hour endeavor.  But, I finally got it and am about to start the 4th row of the snowflake (looks like a poinsettia to me, which means he's going to have red flowers on his manly hat, but let's just keep that joke between us girls).

Honey's sweater hit a little snag.  I got all the way to the row (22 inches of fabric knitted expertly and evenly after having to frog it completely three times) where you begin binding off for the shawl collar and the arm pits and realized that I have been knitting the darned thing one size smaller than I originally thought.  NOT to worry, though!  This I can fix with a little side-panel magic and it will look just like it was supposed to be that way.  That's really not the snag I'm talking about, though I about collapsed when I realized that I had knit the darned front three inches smaller in width than I thought.  The snag is that, apparently, the Scandinavians who do the technical math for Drops and who came up with the published pattern for this sweater can't actually do math any better than I can.  In reality, I can apparently add and subtract better than they can--and this makes me feel a little less stupid about some pattern corrections that I've had to make lately for my own published patterns.  Apparently, someone miscounted and not by a few stitches at the Drops offices.  Using the Drops math, I had about 26 extra stitches just laying around at the end of my row when I went to cast off for the collar.  That's a lot of stitches.  I believe that I have corrected the math, and the pattern is pretty simple otherwise; I'm hoping that I don't get the whole thing done and then I can't make the shawl collar fit but we'll cross that bridge later.  Meanwhile, this manly sweater is currently beginning to take on a tank-top appearance, which I think is kind of amusing. 

1 comment:

  1. Weird, a bunch of your posts showed up in my Reader...a glitch of sorts.

    If I change my name to Rocket, may I have these. I love mittens!

    Love,
    "Rocket"

    ReplyDelete

Please leave a message. Thanks so much for stopping by to visit me!

Translate

Search This Blog