Wednesday, April 23, 2008

With My Ragtop Down So My Hair Can Blow

Convertibles


In between sewing skirts, complaining about sock heels, and being woken up nightly by dogs at 1am-ish (thanks, Frieda!), I managed to finish my convertible fingerless mitts. No, really, they're done. See that photo above? Believe me when I say that I don't have the skills to combine two photos of the same mitt into one photo.

They turned out very well, I think, and I love that I can roll them up if I want more finger coverage, or down if the fingers need access to the outside. I will wear them on Friday to Ichiro Bobblehead night at Safeco Field. Spring comes but slowly here this year, and our seats will be cold.

I'm planning to write up the pattern eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later), although I'll probably knit at least one more mitt before I post it. I'm not 100% happy with some of the fudging that I had to do on the thumb to get the numbers to work out right, and my notes are a little on the sketchy side. Also, I might take out some stitches to make it a little more snug.

Linda (who has a private Blogger profile, so I couldn't contact her directly) asked in the comments on my first post about how I finished up the blue when I picked up the purple. It's a good question, and it's something that I didn't think at all about while I was knitting the first mitt, so I have no idea what I did. On the second mitt, I did think about it, but now I'm not totally sure I can describe what I did (this is another good reason to knit a third mitt). I think that I should have taken some photos!

Basically, I started the purple in it's natural order, but once I got around the whole spiral, I just kept on ribbing with the purple. Right below the ribbing, there are still two rows of blue all the way around, so there's no obvious break in the pattern. I did knit some of the blue stitches out of order, by shifting the stitches around so that eventually one blue caught up with the other one. Honestly, I don't think that it looks any different than when I just spaced out and started the ribbing.

Another thing that I can't quite figure out is how much yarn I used of each color. Each skein of Louet light worsted is 100g. I started with two full skeins, that I did not weigh, so I would assume that that was 200g, more or less. The mitts weigh 47g each (suprisingly, exactly the same amount), or 94g total. I have 46g of purple left, and 82g of blue left. 94g + 46g + 82g = 222g, and that's not counting scraps from the considerable number of ends that had to be woven in. I have no idea whether the skeins were the same starting weight, or whether one was heavier than the other, but I think that it's safe to say that if I reversed the colors, I could get another whole pair out of the leftovers. I do really like this yarn, and I like that I'm getting a little extra (I don't think that 10% over can be humidity or something), but I'll have to remember to weigh before and after next time!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I bet your brother would love a pair of these.

Rhonda said...

These turned out great! And if you are making another pair, forget your brother and give them to another knitter! Hint! ;)

Anonymous said...

the girlies on standby waving just to say hi...

i like how those turned out. :)

Anonymous said...

These are fantastic!

I secretly love this song. :)