Convertible Mitten Update -- Finished!

I finally finished the convertible mittens. It took me awhile to get to the point where I wanted to take the time to finish them. If you remember from a previous post, I had some trouble with the thumbs. Of course, when I don't feel confident about what I am doing, I tend to put it off; but 35 degree temperatures in Chicago was the  sign that I needed to finish them for my friend's sake! 

You can see in the palm of the mitten where I tried to graph if using the Kitchener Stitch. I really like the way the ribbing around the finger opening looks. I only put a "texting" thumb on the right hand. I am not really happy about the way it made the thumb look weird and really over-sized. But from the picture, it makes it easy to text. It would especially be beneficial to iPhone users (or other smart phones) that are driven by touch. When using these phones, you must remove your gloves to use them.  I think that I will be making myself a pair of these really soon! 

Happy knitting!

Convertible Mitten Update -- Thumbs Down

The convertible mitten project is languishing in a bag as other obligations (work) and passions (MHFV) have taken priority over knitting this week. Thankfully, I do have a long train commute out of the city everyday and was able to get a little bit of work done on the mitten thumb. It was, however, all for naught as I soon found out I made a huge miscalculation on the number of stitches that I needed to leave live for the thumb. By the time I had knitted half way up the thumb, I realized that you could have put 3 thumbs in the opening. Of course it looked ridiculous. So much for "winging it."

It is errors in judgement like this that make me appreciate website forums like Knitting Paradise. I was able to quickly get a suggestion from another knitter on how to correct this problem. I am getting lots of practice picking up stitches with dpns. I picked up a row of knitting as close to the original live stitches as possible and frogged down to that point. I then tinked back to the original live stitches.

My next step was to use the kitchener stitch to close up some of the stitches in the palm.  I have never used the kitchener stitch on any project, so I hit YouTube and watched a video by theknitwitch. The video was easy to follow and the repair job turned out better than I expected. I had a rather difficult time because the stitches were a bit stretched and they didn't smooth out really well. The lesson learned here is to use a waste yarn that is not bigger than the yarn in the project. I will obviously have to do the same thing to the second mitten as it has the exact same problem. At least I was not knitting the mitten thumbs two-at-a-time!

Happy Knitting!