Iron Craft ’15 Challenge #13 – Pride and Prejudice Mittens

This week our Iron Craft project had to include text in it somehow. I had an idea, but it involved buying a couple foreign language dictionaries, so it didn’t come together. Then I started thinking about how cool a pair of mittens with a quote from Pride and Prejudice would be. I actually was kept awake thinking about how I would do these! So, off to designing I went.

Click on the chart to see it better on Flickr

These were quite a challenge to design. I started with the text. I was going to go with one of the more common quotes like “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” but then I saw this quote from Mr. Bennet and really liked it instead. Charting a good font that would be easy to read and fit on the mitten was tricky.

The rest of the design is inspired by vintage Pride and Prejudice book covers. A peacock (proud as a peacock) was a common motif, such as on this version from 1895.

Another tricky thing to chart. The feather eye design wasn’t too tough, but oh, the peacock. I ended up using three different cross stitch and embroidery designs as inspiration to chart this bird that circles the cuff of the mitten.

Since I have not knit these up, I am not sharing a pattern or pdf for them yet. I have charted them to be knit with lace weight yarn on size 000 needles for a gauge of 15 stitches and 17 rows per inch, a very delicate knit. I plan of using the cyan blue and natural Knit Picks Gloss that I am using on my State Fair Mittens. I have designed them so the writing is on the palm, I think of it as almost a secret message. (Though of course, it could be moved to the front.) My plan is to maybe to the writing only on once hand and have the other just be the peacock pattern. I also think I may flip the peacock for the second hand so they face in opposite directions.

Oh, it is tempting to cast these on….