recipe for little mitts

Thanks for those great suggestions on the short row heel, everyone. I'm afraid I got impatient and did the heel in solid green because I wanted to finish and block the stocking before embarking on a road trip with the kids tomorrow. However, I plan to do a second stocking with the same pattern but different colors, so I'll give those ideas a try and let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, Anya...



...has cold hands. It's that time of year where you want to be outside when the sun is shining, but you still need to protect those precious little fingers, toes and ears from the chilly air. Poor thing wears all of Daniel's hand-me-down outerwear: jackets, boots, even mittens I knit up for him a couple years ago. Those dear mittens have been worn and loved so much that they are fuzzy and a little matted, but the real problem is that they're too big. Anya will come up to me with her hands outstretched and complain "Hot! Hot!" which I think is her generic word for "Something is wrong with the temperature and I am uncomfortable!" Then she says "Hole! Hole!" which is asking for mittens, presumably because you have to stick your thumb through the thumb hole and she can't say "Mitten!" yet. (The words are coming, finally, but they take some interpretation still.) Then I'll put her mittens on and she'll be so proud to have the thumbs in the right place and about a minute later they've worked themselves off and onto the ground because they're so loose she can't keep them on. We had to leave the park early one day last weekend because her mittens wouldn't stay on and her hands were too cold without them.

What kind of mother am I?

I made her some little handwarmers for this period of fall before it gets cold, truly cold.



I think she likes them. They do have a thumb-hole, after all. And yesterday she didn't take them off until she'd been running around so much she was hot and wanted her jacket off, too.



Pattern: Mine. I think each one took about 30 minutes. Instructions are below.
Yarn: Patons Classic wool, a bit of leftover from another project. Any worsted weight (approx. 5spi) will do.
Made for: Anya's little hands.

Instructions

1. You need a bit of worsted weight yarn (wool is best if you want these to be warm) and DPNs that give you an approximate gauge of 5 stitches per inch

2. Measure the circumference of the hands you intend to knit for. Anya's are between 5 and 5.5 inches around (she wiggles when you measure her). Round up or down to the nearest whole number and multiply that number by 5. We'll call this X.

3. Cast on X number of stitches, divide between 3 DPNs, and join to work in the round.

4. Work 3x2 ribbing (K3, P2) until it looks like you need a hole for the thumb. I worked 15 rounds, or about 2.5".

5. At beginning of next round, cast off a few stitches. For these little handwarmers, I cast off three, but if you're making them for bigger hands you may want to cast off more...trust yourself and wing it.

6. Finish round. Before beginning next round, cast on as many stitches as you cast off using backward loop method (again, I did 3, but you may want to do more).

7. Work another few rounds of ribbing until the mitts look long enough. I did 6; you may want to do more. Bind off, hide the ends, make a second one exactly the same, and go boldly forth into the chilly autumn air!

Comments

ann said…
how sweet!
Unknown said…
cute! I may have to make some.

Dee Anna
Jessi said…
Those are truly precious!
FeeDee said…
So do you only leave one round "open" for the thumb? I'm a new knitter and I'm not sure if I understood that correctly, thanks!
LA said…
I made a pair of these last year for my little girl, now I need to make her larger ones, she loved them!

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