Success

I finished Satanski's mittens, and am really pleased with how they came out. Mittens are great! Here's the final product:

And here are the mittens with the scarf that I made.



I've enjoyed this yarn so much (and I still have so much left) that I'm going to make Satanski a hat, too.

Halfway home

I finished my first mitten! I'm very proud of myself. I nearly messed up when I got to the thumb, where I didn't pick up stitches tight enough and had left a rather noticeable hole, but I found the mistake in time to go back and fix it. This pattern is pretty much idiotproof, since I'm sure I made a bunch of boo boos that are completely invisible by this point. I love how knitting this in the round means that I get to knit the whole time (after I finish the ribbing), but that I can then turn the mitten inside out when I'm finished and see a darling knit pattern. When I finished the mitten, I picked it up to photograph it. I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the mitten at the same time as the scarf, so I finally wove in the ends on the scarf. It only took a week.

I feel like I understand mittens now, and am looking forward to starting the other hand tomorrow. Because a lot of patterns say that kid mittens can be interchangeable, I will make the next one as identical as I can to the one I finish today (might be a little better looking, now that I know what I'm doing), but the next set of mittens I do will differentiate between left and right.

All finished!

I finished Satanski's scarf, and it came out great! I love this yarn (Malabrigo Worsted, in Oceanus), and Satanski loves his scarf. That picture to the left shows what the scarf looked like last night, when I was about 60% of the way finished. I'm going to get started on matching mittens tomorrow, with a hat to follow soon thereafter. I need to block the scarf, as right now all it wants to do is roll itself back into a ball, but that means that I might as well block all the other stuff I've been ignoring for a while. Block party tomorrow!

Sorry, I'm groaning over here, too.
















This is what the OpArt blanket is looking like these days. That kid is due nigh on two months from now and I still don't know when we'll be having his dad's baby shower at work, so I should definitely get the lead out and start doing a lot of work on this again. Even after I'm done knitting, I'm going to be weaving in ends forever, so I should just do it already.

Hopes, dashed

I had high hopes for the scarf that I was going to make Satanski. I sat down, thought of a pattern, and charted it. All was well, until I realized that my chart was not taking into account the two decreases I need to work on each row to even out the two yarn overs I was including. I think I tried to get too fancy, too fast, and the whole thing just annoyed me. So I decided to modify a baby blanket pattern from Debbie Stoller's Stitch and Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook and make it into a scarf instead. I've made the Big, Bad Baby Blanket a couple of times already (and I'm pretty sure I have a third one somewhere on a set of circulars), so by now the pattern is pretty much dead easy for me. I'm hoping that I will have enough yarn left over afterward to make the kid a pair of mittens, or even a hat. I can't remember what the name of the yarn is, because I bought and had it wound in Vermont, and cannot find the label at all. I just started it yesterday, but it's kid-sized and knitting up quickly, so I will upload photos once I get home from work.

My OpArt is coming along well. I'm up to 132 stitches in each section. I need to pay more attention though, because a couple of rounds ago I dropped a stitch about six rows down, and that was super annoying to fix in pattern.