Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Like I didn't already have enough to do.

Logic:
We're going to South Dakota for Christmas.
South Dakota is cold.
Cold can only be thwarted with mittens.
New mittens are much better than old mittens at thwarting the cold.
If I don't make new mittens, I'm going to freeze to death in South Dakota.
I don't want to die.
Conclusion: 
I must make new mittens now.

Yeah... sound logic. Despite the fact that I have eleventy million other things to do... I spent the entire last weekend making one mitten. Well, really, I made like 2.6 mittens, if you ignore the fact that I ripped them all out. I have no idea why it was a good idea to a) cast on something new when it's nearly Christmas and I'm swamped, and b) if  I really had to make the dang mittens, why on earth did I decide to learn a new thing to do it? I don't get me, sometimes.



I'm making mittens from silk hankies, or mawata, as I'm told it's supposed to be called. I bought this silk at Stitches West last March because pretty. I always figured it would be mittens, because like every other knitter out there, I read the Yarn Harlot's post on silk hankie mittens and I wanted some. Disclaimer: it's actually way harder than it looks. First I made the "yarn" way too thin, then I made the mittens way too big, then I had trouble with even-ness, but. I made a mitten. It looks like a child knitted it, but I like the color, and in theory, it will be warm. I think the second mitten will be much easier and (I seriously hope) not look quite so much like a child made it. There's a steep learning curve here. I watched this Knit Picks video on how to turn the silk layers into yarn, which helped a ton. And luckily, the yarn frogs well- and not just well, it's like actual yarn when you rip it out instead of the fluff you were knitting with.



In case you're interested, I did indeed finish the moto jacket (blog post on that later), I'm one foot (not the unit of measure, the body part) away from finishing the socks, I haven't even touched the box of blue yarn, and I did maybe 2 more rows on the sample sweater. I did, however, make all of the Christmas cards, write an ebook I hadn't planned on writing, get half way through an Archer, make that one dang mitten, and finish my Christmas gifting. Go, me.


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