Thoughts on the Hidden Gusset Mitts

I finished these Sunday evening -- finally, it felt, though it didn't take me that long relatively speaking.  It's only that I finished the first mitt in two days, then took a month and a half to finish the second one, not for lack of interest, but because I kept making stupid counting (or not counting) mistakes and had to rip it out more than once, so that I put off knitting for days on end.

The pattern is the Hidden Gusset mitts by Mone Dräger, available free at Knitty.  The yarn is a skein of Colinette Jitterbug in Velvet Plum, which as I've said was previously a pair of socks that was a little too big, so I ripped them out and recycled the yarn.  It's a gorgeous color and feels wonderful to knit with, but I don't think I will ever use this yarn for socks again, as they felted alarmingly quickly, after only one or two wearings.  (Yes, all of the three pairs of socks I've made with Jitterbug have done this.)  Luckily I was able to pull out even the slightly-felted bits with little trouble, and they show in the reknitted piece only if you know what you're looking for.

(The color is a little washed-out in the photos, but I noticed that the camera picks up reds better against a white or dark bluish background than it does against the golden-brown of my wood floors.  The Velvet Plum has a bit more blue in its purple than these photos would suggest.)

The mitt doesn't cling to my wrist as much as I like, but perhaps this is partly because the Jitterbug is slightly heavier than the one recommended in the pattern, so that mine came out a little larger -- the ones in the Knitty photos look a bit stretched on the wearer, which would of course make them more snug.  At least my watch won't show as much as it does under more closely-fitting mitts -- does she or doesn't she?

I didn't especially like the little ridge that runs up alongside the traveling stitches, which is from the increase used in the original pattern, so I used the usual M1L and M1R.  I also, just because it amused me, made the traveling stitches twist as well, by working a K2tog tbl on the left side, and on the right side a rather complicated sequence of slipping 2 and twisting the second of that pair of stitches, then knitting them together -- I guess because of the twisted stitch's tendency to cheat to the right, these traveling stitches aren't as pronounced therefore, as the ones in the original, but as I say it amused me.  Such is life.

Comments

[marylou]

Cute. Some colors are really hard to photograph, aren't they? Glad to know that about Jitterbug. I have had that experience with Bearfoot from Mountain colors. Gorgeous yarn, but maybe not for socks unless you intend to handwash.