Mitten Design Along

Since July of last year I’ve had fun hosting the Mitten Garland Advent Calendar Knit Along followed by the Winter Snows Mittens Mystery Knit Along. People have been asking me what’s next so I thought I try something different, a Design Along.

What the heck is a Design Along? Well, instead of my giving you a pattern and to knit, I’ll teach you how to design a pair of mittens custom fit for you in whatever yarn and gauge you chose to use.

Those Zig-Zag Mittens were my first go at designing back in 2011.

I started designing my own mittens because I found patterns were often too short for my hands. Doing the knit alongs I noticed so many other people had similar issues with fit. Everyone’s hands are so different the Craft Yarn Council doesn’t even give standards for hand sizes.

How will this work? Each week for four weeks we will go through the steps I take to create a mitten design. Our goal is that by the end of four weeks you will have designed a color work mitten pattern to fit you and have the skills to create more for yourself and others.

I followed those up with these Sweetheart Mittens, an easy color work design, but three colors per row!

If you don’t want to do color work you can just do the first three weeks. Other than week four, most weeks should not take much time to do your homework, so you’ll still have lots of time for other knitting projects. Though I find designing the color work patterns the most fun.

What you will need to join in:

• Join the Ravelry forum: The Ravelry forums have been a great place to talk during the KALs and will be a good place to ask questions and get answers. You can always ask questions here on the site too.
• Yarn: If you are planning on doing colorwork, I suggest using fingering or at the very least sport weight yarn. You can do colorwork with worsted, but you won’t be able to get the same kind of detail. I typically use about 300 – 350 yards of fingering to make a pair of women’s medium mittens. We won’t be knitting the mittens as part of this DAL, but I imagine if you take the time to design them, you’ll want to knit them too.
• Needles: I used 4 double-points to knit in the round, but you can use whichever method you are most comfortable with. The size should be appropriate for the yarn. For color work, I like to get a rather tight gauge because it hides catches better.
• Measuring tape: A soft dressmakers type tape is best for getting measurements around things.
• Calculator
• Excel or at least a computer and printer, plus ruler and pencil: I design in Excel but I started out just doing it with a pencil on knitters graph paper. You can chose whichever you feel more comfortable with and we’ll talk about both ways.

We’ll start on Monday, February 8th which gives you a little over a week to figure out which yarns you want to use. This is a little bit of an experiment, but I think it could be a lot of fun and I hope you join in.