Mitten Garland Advent Calendar – Mitten #5

Ok, I couldn’t stand watching everyone use so many different colors in their mittens, so I added one more to mine. Just a darker grey I had on hand, Knit Picks Palette in Ash. Don’t worry though, you can still do these mittens with three colors, just do the leaves in white which was my original plan.

Download the chart for Advent Calendar Mitten 5

This week I want to talk a little about some techniques I’ve been using on these mittens.

* In order to keep my Make Ones neat, on the row before an increase, I make sure to never catch/secure my floats at the spot where I will be making the Make One.

* I make sure to never catch/secure a float in the same place one row to the next. If you do it in the same place twice, it will distort the stitches and typically allows you to see the color behind.

* I use dpns to knit my mittens, but don’t want to get a ladder (a column of looser stitches) where I move from needle to needle. So when I finish knitting off one needle, I knit one stitch off the next needle to be worked before moving on to knitting with the empty needle. This makes the break between needles change every row preventing a ladder.

* When I have a break in a color for a couple of rows in a mitten, I typically don’t cut and restart the yarn. Instead, I leave that color at the beginning of the row and catch it every couple of rows under the working yarn until I need it again. This uses a lot less yarn and means a lot less tails to weave in. You just have to be careful not to pull the yarn up too tightly when starting to use it again.

* When doing the tops of the thumbs, I switch to 4″ needles. I find it so much easier to do a small amount of stitches when I don’t have a lot of extra needle hanging around.

There is lots of great chat with tips and tricks for knitting these on our Ravelry forum.