State Fair Mittens ’15 – Designing and Knittng

Time for an update on my State Fair mittens.

Last time, I looked at mittens that had won blue ribbons in the past and tried to find trends. What I came up with was the judges like Scandinavian designs, pointed hands, peasant thumbs and of course neat knitting. (I actually had this discussion recently with another local knitter who has won quite a few ribbons at the Fair. She said the other trend she has noticed is that the judges prefer blue. I’m not the only crazy one looking at all this stuff.)

Then, it was time to get down to the knitty gritty and start designing my mittens. I had started a design for fingering weight, but decided to really challenge myself and try lace weight instead. I have to say it was hard to find the same lace weight in all the colors I wanted, bright blue, red, yellow and white or cream. I gave up on the yellow and found all of the other colors in Knit Picks Gloss Lace.

I did a test swatch, played with a pattern until I had one I liked and started knitting.

I learned one big thing here, in lace weight my gauge knit flat in color work and my gauge knit in the round in color work are not the same at all. So, I ripped out that too small cuff, redesigned the pattern and started over. (Actually, I started over four times to get the picot hem just right.)

Now, I am moving right along with a nice even gauge of 15 stitches and 17 rows per inch on size 000 needles. It took awhile to get used to knitting so tiny, but now I kind of love it. Some things are a little trickier like ticking back or picking up dropped stitches, but all and all it is going smoothly. Today, I’ll put the thumb stitches on waste yarn and try to get a good chunk of the rest of the hand done.

Hopefully, next week I’ll get to show you a finished mitten!