Under the Sea Mittens KAL: Picking Your Yarn

I know we are just finishing up the 12 Days of Christmas KAL, but I am already getting our knit along together for National Knit Mitten Month in January. Last year’s design was a complete mystery, but on Ravelry people asked for some clues to help them better pick their yarns. I’m doing this on the early side so people can take advantage of the sales around the holidays, for example, the Knit Picks’ Big Sale started yesterday.

This year’s mitten is inspired by the cover of a vintage copy of Moby Dick. They have this sort of everything flowing together look.

I am calling them the Under the Sea Mittens. Think seahorses, octopus, seaweed and fish.

You can do them in two or more colors of fingering weight yarn. You’ll need a total of 325 – 350 yards total. I would say about 200 of the main color and 125 of a contrasting color. You can totally bring in at least one more color easily and two more if you don’t mind knitting with three colors in a row.

Here are my colors. I typically work in a pretty restrained palette, this time I went for bright tropical colors.

They are all Knit Picks Palette. Green Tea Heather will be my CC1, Calypso Heather will be my MC and Raspberry Heather will be my CC2. In real life the green tea is a little brighter and the raspberry is a little softer. I like how the heathers make the colors have a little dimension to them.

I think a nice tonal yarn or something with long color changes would also work in this pattern. I think of the main color as the sea, so a tonal blue would be gorgeous. You can keep the pattern very subtle and do colors that are close in color like the book cover or make the pattern really pop by using strong contrast colors like I am. I would reccommend you stay away from hand painted yarns or yarns with lots of quick color changes as I find the pattern details tend to get very lost with those.

I hope this is enough to get you started on your shopping, but if you have any questions please let me know.