A year and a half ago I randomly made a crochet duck for one of my nieces. It was a green duck. To be honest, I simply began an amigurumi shape with green yarn and after a short while I decided it would be a duck. I was hesitant about giving it to my niece because… well… it was a green duck. Continue reading
This project tackled a few items on my to do list:
I’ve been meaning to learn how to knit a top and, with summer coming on, I’ve been looking at beautiful cotton and linen sleeveless tops posted to Ravelry. I’ve been daunted by the idea of using up a lot of beautiful yarn and ending up with something wonky and shonky but it was high time to give it a go. Continue reading
After my recent hiccup with fingerless mittens, I took a more sensible approach and knitted test swatches, took measurements, created charts to figure out stripe patterns and thumb increases, and came up with a variety of much better fitting fingerless mittens.
The end of financial year sale at Morris and Sons suckered me in so I stocked up on random colours and played around with stripes, ribs, and yarns. Continue reading
Sticking with my current obsession with stripes and double pointed needles, I decided to work up some fingerless mittens. I didn’t put much planning in and unfortunately I paid the price.
I looked for a pattern online with roughly the same type of yarn and used their stitch counts and general approach but I didn’t check the hand size they were aiming for and I didn’t knit a gauge swatch (oops).
My own wrist is very thin and I have a long palm and hands. I tried the first mitten on as I was making it. I could see that it wasn’t looking quite right and I made a few adjustment because I was keen on the stripes and trying out the yarn. When the first mitten was done it floated around on my hand! I tried it on a friend’s hand and she also found it awkwardly proportioned. Oh dear. Perhaps I could shrink and felt them, I thought, so I made the second one anyway.
I’ve never felted anything before so after some googling for instructions I gave it a try and, while it might not appear so from the photos above, the mittens have shrunk a touch so they’re not as large as they were but they are still roomy. The wrist area above the ribbing is still too wide. The shape of the mitten between the wrist and the thumb does not follow the shape of a human hand. The thumb hole feels slightly tight and awkward. And they don’t even look felted! Continue reading