Learning to knit mittens

First of all, a word of warning, and apology, to the non knitters, this post is full of knitting geekness!

A few weeks back I decided it was high time I learnt to knit a pair of mittens. After all, I excel at socks and they’re not that different to knit. At the same time I decided a colour work knit was long overdue. So a project was born: knit a pair of stripy mittens. I found two lovely colours in Rowan Pure Wool DK whilst re-stocking the Make Lounge’s shop so I was ready to go.

Except that despite doing some research in my own pattern library and in the huge selection from Ravelry, I couldn’t find “THE” pattern. “I’m a fairly decent knitter, why don’t I try and make a pair of mittens without a pattern?” I told myself, “how hard can it be?”. Well, I had to frog (that’s unraveling your knitting for the uninitiated) my project at least four times and I had to refer to tutorials on You Tube and to other helpful bloggers to get me through, that’s how hard it was! But seeing the result and enriched with a few new techniques and knitting tricks, I can honestly say it was all worth it.

The first thing that became obvious when I started my mittens was that they would be more suited to circular needles than double pointed pins. So I spent a weekend teaching myself the magic loop method, as explained a couple of posts ago.

My next hurdle was the colour changes. As you can see from the picture below, the change was disrupting my beautiful stripes and as a perfectionist, that simply wouldn’t do.

So I did a bit of research and found out that I had to do jogless stripes. This is where I say a big thank you to fellow blogger Technknitter for her wonderfully simple explanation on how to do jogless stripes. After some debate I opted for stationary jogless stripes and this is the result. Better wouldn’t you say?

My last stumbling block was the thumb gusset. I had absolutely no idea how to shape for the thumb and initially, I didn’t even know it was called a gusset. Thanks to Catherine Hirst at the Make Lounge for pointing it out to me! Once I knew what I was looking for, I went digging in online patterns and knitting magazines but unfortunately, none of what I found made sense to me. I’m a very visual person so I opted for a search on You Tube instead and found a plethora of video tutorials and suddenly, gusset making became easy!

I have now finished my pair of fingerless mittens and I love them to bits! They’re made of good quality wool, they fit me perfectly and the stripes are lovely! What a great way to further my knitting skills!