In the end I went with Mitten No. 95. This was the mitten that got my attention in the first place and I thought it would be only fair to start with that first (this is my justification to the other mittens in the book that were clamouring to be knitted together all at the same time).
I like the muted colours even though with the butterfly motif, I could have gotten away with pretty much any colour! On top of that, the last two pairs of mittens I’ve knitted have had white as the dominant colour so I just couldn’t face another pair with white. I have just gotten past the thumb placement. In Selbuvotter, the instruction was always to put the stitches onto waste yarn and cast on across the gap on the next round. I did this for both pairs I knitted from the book and my verdict is that it just doesn’t work. It works in theory, of course, but picking up stitches in colour pattern? Life is too short for that kind of thing. When I put in the thumb today, I used Zimmermann’s thumb trick: knit across the stitches for the thumb with scrap yarn, slip them back on the left needle and knit across them properly, continue on safe in the knowledge that you have spared yourself 30 minutes of torture trying to pick up colourwork later on. You can just unravel the scrap yarn and pop the live stitches onto needles and continue on up the thumb in whatever pattern you’ve established. I still can’t believe I didn’t do it for the other mittens. Lesson learned!
I’ve also been working on my Henley Perfected and finished up the left front a while ago.
It looks a bit odd because I have it all on one long circular. You know those bits of patterns when they tell you to leave the stitches on a holder? I hate having to do that because I don’t like using rigid holders and end up using scrap yarn. Of course, this means that I have ends hanging all over the place which, by logical deduction, means that at some point I am going to pick up the wrong end and knit with it. All of this mullarky drives me nutty bananas! My solution is to simply keep whatever pieces aren’t being knit on hanging around on the long circular. It sounds fiddly but it’s not and especially not compared to the alternative.
Anyway, I still have sleeves to knit for this one so I’d better get a move on. The Mitten Thing was a little more all-enveloping than I was anticipated. It was worth it though. I regret nothing!
Wow, so many tips in one post! Am writing them all down quickly ;D
I do the exact same anytime it says to leave stitches on a holder. Although I have found it tricky if you are trying to do colourwork while you have those unknitted bits hanging around!