Cara's mittens

My dirty secret: I am a closet Twilight fan. There, I said it...let us never speak of this again.

What can I say, it speaks to the repressed 13 year old girl still buried deep within. If I was still 11 Edward would be my new John Taylor from Duran Duran.

But regardless of whether I've read all 4 books, including the Edward-only-perspective-version of the first book online, and on-demand-ed the movie the day it went to DVD (right...TMI) I would still have wanted to knit these super sweet mitts.



free pattern: Bella's mittens from subliminalrabbit --a thousand thank-yous for making this super cute pattern FREE!!
yarn: stash-busted Patons Classic Merino (100% wool) not quite two balls (knit double-stranded) in "chestnut brown"
needles: 4mm
mods: I knit to a tighter gauge to make the mitts smaller for my child-sized hands.



I am not actually as obsessed as I sound...there is no question that that movie was lame. I do not even remember seeing those mitts in the film (though I do remember there being a barage of gortex jackets, which given that movie's location shoot of my former home of Vancouver, is no surprise) Gortex is in essence, fashion suicide. Sure, it keeps you dry I guess.

But I am definitely not in a position to make fun of any Twi-hards out there. Particularly NOT given the ever-so-relentlessly-sliding-me-to-insanity scale of crap TV, pop culture, cheesy books, bad groupie bios and underground comics that yours truly likes to consume with regularity and without impunity. I'm Cara, and I have NO SHAME. Consider yourselves my support group.

I was excited to use up some stash yarn for this project. As with most of my stash-busting knitting, I ran out of yarn about half-way through the second mitt. (Sigh). So after putting it down for a few days trying to decide whether I would actually BUY more or abandon them forever, I hopped on my bike and sped off to my mom's house to route through HER stash. And SUCCESS, I came up with a couple small balls of leftover Chestnut Brown classic. Jackpot! I biked home and finished up the mitts. Then I biked BACK to give her what was leftover of that yarn, as I refused to keep it in MY own stash (anal much?). Suffice it to say that there are at least three different lot numbers of yarn in these mitts. I guess the fact that I was knitting them double-stranded probably accounted for why it all seemed to blend together pretty perfectly.



My only hiccup came about three-quarters of the way through the second mitt when I glanced down to dicover that I had somehow twisted one of the cables the wrong way. Grrrr. I had to rip back down past the wrist. But no matter, they went up pretty quickly in the end.

It was only after I'd FINISHED them and was about to block that I discovered that in ripping back I had apparently begun knitting again at a different spot. All this essentially means is that one mitt has one less cable repeat. When I tried them on, one was about an inch and a half shorter than the other. BLOCKING to the rescue! Now they are both the same length, regardless of the number of cable repeats.

Other than that there hasn't been much knitting around these parts (still inching along on that brown and orange scarf...). Mostly "gardening", but I won't bore you with those details. We're in a row townhouse, so it's not much of a backyard. It's more of a ditch, really. And by "gardening" I actually mean about three weeks worth of hauling off dirt (our backyard is apparently made of ROCKS)under cover of darkness and replacing it all with topsoil. A month later we are finally at a stage where we can actually begin planting things, though I am possibly now too sore and exhausted to do so.

C'est la vie. Hopefully soon we'll actually be able to enjoy the space back there a bit more.