{"id":15,"date":"2007-05-29T09:37:16","date_gmt":"2007-05-29T16:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stringpage.com\/blog\/?p=15"},"modified":"2007-11-29T13:23:17","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T18:23:17","slug":"instant-gratification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/?p=15","title":{"rendered":"Instant gratification"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a break from the socks, I started a pair of mittens this weekend. Zoom! After working on socks on small needles, the heavy-weight mittens go extremely quickly. I’d seen thrummed mittens<\/a> online and decided I must try it! A holiday weekend with temperatures in the high 80s F is a great time to start incredibly warm wool mittens, right? (It was almost too hot to try them on for size without my fingers melting.)<\/p>\n

I pulled a pile of grey fleece from my wool stash, and some random white wool from who-knows-where from my yarn stash, and packed them off for a weekend-long picnic with this bunch<\/a>. I started on Saturday afternoon with my drop spindle, spinning and plying some of the grey wool to use in decorative bands on the cuffs. I was very pleased that I remembered how to wrap the singles into a ball properly, so that I could ply from both ends. <\/p>\n

These mittens have tufts of wool knitted into the stitches every few rows. Nick described them as “putting your hand into an inverted small animal”, but they’re much nicer-feeling than his description implies.<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

The tufts show up more clearly in this closeup.<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

I’m not a super-fast knitter, but by Sunday afternoon I’d finished the entire left mitten.<\/p>\n

\"Left<\/p>\n

Ignore the cuff on this one – this was my first attempt at stranded colorwork, and I wasn’t sure if the odd appearance was due to my error, the difference in weight of the two yarns (didn’t get the grey quite heavy enough) or some other problem, so I didn’t rip it out and try again. The pattern is from a traditional Gotland, Sweden mitten, and it’s really supposed to look like this.<\/p>\n

\"Colorwork<\/p>\n

The inside isn’t too bad, regardless of what the outside of the first mitten looks like. The pattern comes from a library copy of The Swedish Mitten Book: Traditional Patterns from Gotland<\/a>, an interesting little book. I experimented with using the two-hand method of holding one color in each hand, which works very well for me (after a few minutes of fumbling), even with my funny backward stitches. <\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

My fellow picnicers were quite amazed at both the mitten and the speed of production. I came away with two commissions and an offer to sell them for me. After an hour or two of work on Sunday while watching Casino Royale<\/a> I now have the second one about two-thirds finished. Then, back to the socks…<\/p>\n

New skills: stranded colorwork, thumbs (these are my first mittens), thrums. These are very satisfying to make, and as close to instant gratification as knitting comes – I forsee more mittens in my future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a break from the socks, I started a pair of mittens this weekend. Zoom! After working on socks on small needles, the heavy-weight mittens go extremely quickly. I’d seen thrummed mittens online and decided I must try it! A holiday weekend with temperatures in the high 80s F is a great time to start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-knitting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringpage.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}