The Shaadi Mitts got the better of me so I decided to knit another pair of Shirl’s Mitts for my daughter.
I started them while waiting for our plane to take off on our way to visit her and finished them a few days later. It’s hard to knit with three grandkids all wanting one’s attention.
Cleckheaton Country 8 ply yarn in color 2250. They call it light green but I’d call it pistachio. I believe this color has been discontinued.
I renamed the Drinkers Mitts: Cheers to You! Mitts
I really enjoyed knitting these. The only issue was finding the right (or close enough) colors in my stash. Most of the yarn is Knit Picks Stroll fingering weight yarn. The beer mugs at the top are knit from an acrylic yarn that just didn’t seem to get along with the wool blend after blocking the mitts and want to recede into the background. My ribbing isn’t as nice as I wish.
My friend liked them. A lot. I wish I would have gotten a picture of her modeling them. But alas I didn’t.
Apart from the background color change, the Cosmopolitan drink (?) is now a Margarita as the pink I had didn’t go with the red. If I make these again, I would add a row or two of plain knitting between the beer mugs and the ribbing. Maybe it was using two different yarns (acrylic and wool) that caused the less than perfect transition.
The Shaadi Mitts I began last January then restarted them because they were too large (even with the right gauge) are no more.
The pattern notes indicated that these mitts are challenging and I thought I was up to the task. Well, sometime last spring I lost my knitting mojo and allowed them to languish in my knitting basket for months and months.
And when I picked them up again, I forgot about how to hold the dominant yarn vs background yarn.
The dominant yarn color goes under the background yarn color where as the receding (background) yarn color goes over. It doesn’t seem like it would be that important but it is. Very.
The longer strand of yarn is the one under the shorter upper yarn which makes the longer yarn stand out more. The shorter upper yarn pushes the longer strand out.
You can see here that the purl stitches recede in the lower section but are more prominent in the upper section where I reversed the dominant and receding yarns. For a better explanation visit these sites: Knitting Daily, Paper Tiger, and Ysolda Teague.
On the front side the circles and spirals appeared smaller in the last sections. This was all due to yarn dominance.
(Oops! I misspelled spiral.)
Then I screwed up the Bavarian twisted stitch.
The mitts were still huge and I just wasn’t having any fun knitting them anymore. What do you do about a unfun project? Let it hibernate, rip it out, continue with the drudgery or throw it away?
Good-bye Shaadi Mitts. Maybe another time.
Casting off or binding off essentially means to take the knitted stitches off the needles resulting with a finished edge.
Depending on what I’m knitting determines the bind off I use. Sometimes this results in a TIGHT clean edge that does not stretch enough to go over heels, heads, or any other body part.
There are many other ways to bind off and I’m not going to go into those techniques but I will show you what was recommended on the Drinker’s Mitts.
Elizabeth Zimmermann’s sewn bind off: Cut off a length of yarn about 3 times as long as the knitting and thread it onto a yarn needle. ( Seriously, the yarn should be at least three times as long as the knitting edge you want to bind off. Don’t skimp on this!)
*Insert the needle into the first 2 stitches on the knitting needle as if to purl and draw the yarn through.
Reinsert the needle into the first stitch on the knitting needle as if to knit, draw the yarn through and slip the stitch off.*
Repeat from * to *.
This leaves a cast on row that looks very similar to a long tail cast on. It is stretchy and looks even.
I still need to block these mitts and as soon as I have the other one finished, I will block them…and hope the wonky stitches relax and even out.
Knitting In Flashes 