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!
