Wednesday 17 September 2014

Swedish [stash bust] mittens

Here is a project that I totally forgot to blog about! The Swedish mitts, as I would like to call them, took place in February and March, but due to a few procedural mishaps, I didn't write anything about them until I got around to fix my (sad) mistakes.


The pattern is Ingrid's mitts and it had been on my queue for a while. It found itself there, mostly because after my 2012 summer trip in the North (aka Sweden and Norway), I had the urge to knit something Swedish or Norwegian, or something with their flag colors. I searched for patterns on Ravelry, found a few things, some I queued. 
This is the first project I finish based on that search/idea.

It is a rather simple design. I enjoyed the feature of the Dala horses a lot. I also decided to stash bust and alter the coloring of the design a little bit, since I had leftovers of an array of different colors and I wanted to play around a bit.

I chose to knit this project as something easy and relaxing, as it was relatively simple and featured something I like the most in knitting: colorwork. But the process of making it, reminded me that I really should pay more attention to what a pattern says! I have been guilty of that more than a few times when knitting from a pattern. Sometimes it happens because I am not focused, sometimes because I am too bored to read anything, sometimes because of both!


This project produced two epic fails:
FAIL #1: On the first mitt, I didn’t do the horses properly. Instead of them looking away from each other, now they were looking at the other's butt.
FAIL #2: When working on the second mitt, instead of increases I used decreases (so clever..) and of course made a tighter second mitt!


So these two produced an uneven pair of mittens. Truly uneven. The truth is that I didn't really mind that I mixed up the horses, but I did mind that one mitt was larger than the other. That got me thinking: how should I fix this? steek or frog?



It took me several months to find time to do it, but lastly I settled with frogging. The reason is that I was expecting the steek to produce a bulky seam at the side and therefore produce an ugly mitt, so I didn't risk it all. Good old frogging did the job nicely. I frogged to the first mitt in order to fix (somewhat) the horses and make the mitt tighter, as the second one, as I like it that way much better.



For the finishing I also added two lines of elastic thread on the edge of the mittens to keep them from getting loose later with use. 

All that happened during the summer, so I have truly never worn the mitts at all. I wonder if that will happen anytime soon!

2 comments:

  1. Sometimes you just have to frog, it happens! They were well worth the effort though, super pretty! The elastic thread is a fantastic idea, I may have to steal it from you!

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    1. Please do! I use it on hat edges also and it is a saver!

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