Friday, September 11, 2009

Scandinavian Gauntlet Mittens


For winter I have a red and black reversible down jacket that I haven't gotten as much use out of as I might wish, because of a problem I didn't foresee when I bought it. The sleeves don't have any inner cuffs to keep cold air out!
Obviously this situation called for some corrective action, so I've just designed a mitten with a flaring cuff or a gauntlet. Now I when I wear the jacket, I can put the mitten cuffs over my sweater sleeves inside the jacket sleeves, and they should do the job.
The mitten starts out with a 2-color cast-on, then has 2 rounds of a 2-color twined purl edging. The rest of the gauntlet is in one color.

When I was looking for mitten ideas, I found a mitten shape in Knitting in the Nordic Tradition by Vibeke Lind, where supposedly the gauntlet had been done in one color on the same size needle as used for the colorwork in the hand and it pulled in sufficiently to work. That was the theory at least.

In practice however, I found that I had to decrease about 1/8 of the stitches, and go down to a smaller needle to make K1, K1tbl/P2 ribbing for 1” at the wrist. Then I went back to the original needle size for the colorwork starting with the fewer stitches.

Whenever I design something, it seems I have to try making at least some part of it in a couple different ways, which was the case for the thumb gore. I finally settled on having a “seamline” in the main color along the sides of the gore because it looked so much better than trying to do a gore in the same pattern as the hand. I also decided that doing the thumb in just Salt & Pepper looked better.

Usually when I finish off the mitten tip, I like to decrease equally all the way around, staggering the decreases, but decided that this one looked neater if the decreases were paired along the sides and the tip was kitchenered. I liked the colorwork and wanted to maintain the pattern as much as possible.
I'm rather happy with how the mitten turned out! So happy in fact that it's going to be class at Spirit Work Knitting & Designs. For information go to the Spirit Work website, click on "Classes & Events", then click on my classes. The information should be up shortly. The class will run on alternate Wednesday evenings, from October 14 through November 18, 2009, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Hope to see you there!