warms the heart

I finished the second mitten of the pair I was working on in Florida. This is Pattern 25 (catchy name, don't you think?) from Knitting Marvelous Mittens. The corrugated ribbing went much faster on the second one. I made a mistake in the third row of colorwork on the first mitten, so I purposely made the same mistake (swapped the colors) to match on the second one. Because this design is not easily shortened for a smaller size, the thumb gusset starts higher so the hand portion is shorter for the adult size that I made, rather than having the thumb gusset start just above the cuff and lopping off the top of the pattern for a smaller hand size. This makes for some mighty long cuffs, which ends up being one of my favorite things about them. I swear I will never skimp on mitten cuff length in the future! I have a feeling this won't be the last pattern I knit from this book.


Just for the fun of it, I also wanted to show these :::ahem::: vintage mittens that my Gram knit when I was a kid. They're on my hands for this picture, but they're Leah's size now and she wears them on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure that when Gram made them for her young granddaughter in the 1970s, she never imagined that they'd also warm the hands of her great granddaughter!

I keep knitting from stash, but the stash doesn't seem to be getting any smaller. I'm having fun putting good yarn to good use, though, so I keep chipping away at it. The moment I saw the Thorpe hat on Through the Loops, I knew it was next up as a stashbusting project. While listening to classic radio shows' Christmas specials (including Miracle on 34th St. and It's a Wonderful Life) on CD from the library the past couple of evenings, I used three balls of leftover yarn, including some handspun purple, handspun gray angora, and gray ragg wool. I knit two strands together for a very thick hat and used up every last bit of all three balls. Actually, I ran just a tiny bit short on the gray. There's a strand of substitute gray in each braid. Shhh!

Okay, warm hands? Check. Warm head? Check. Got 'em covered. You know what warms my heart? When the kids were checking out all the ornaments on the tree (again!) while we were listening to those old-time radio shows and Leah stops at this hardanger ornament, 20+ of which were stitched by me 13 years ago as favors at my sister's bridal shower, and says,...

"Mom, will you teach me how to do hardanger?" Mmm...hardanger. You bet I will, Goob!