2012 Project: Mittens (for Miranda)

Apparently I like making things that start with M for the M people in my life. 🙂

Well, if you’ve been here before you’ve heard tell of Miranda. She’s a great friend and amazing housemate. While we’ve been friends for years, I haven’t knit her anything and I think there were a few weird reasons why kicking around in my subconscious.

1. Knitting stuff for loved ones is tough. What if they don’t like it? What if it makes things weird and you break up? This is also the reason why I stopped making individual folders for friends in gmail- I was doing that but I don’t see those people anymore. So now everyone goes in the ‘friends’ folder. (Is there a job opening for a superstition creator? Because I would rock at that job.)

2. Miranda has a definite sense of style all her own… and while I admire and appreciate it, I still don’t understand style enough to figure out what hers is or how to buy/make something to fit it. Does that make sense? Like, I don’t want to be the weird aunt that sends a sweater every year that you only wear around that same weird aunt just to make her happy.

3. Nothing seemed cool enough. Also, most people that I’ve knit for have said, hey, I saw this cool thing in a book! EASY, DONE. But you guys have been to this blog so you know- I don’t think anything is cool. Because I am a troll who hates everything. Except–

CATS!

Cats are awesome. Especially in that way where when you think about their drawbacks (barfing everywhere, sticking their butts in your face, banging on the door in the middle of the night) you’re like, wait, maybe cats aren’t- then they chase a string or something and it’s like, oh you!

Look! There are even extra cats on the thumb. I call these… bonus cats. I would say these mittens are packed to the brim with cats. Anymore would be gaudy and overwhelming. Any less would be disappointing.

I actually had a hard time making these mittens. The surprising part was that it wasn’t the yarn that gave me a hard time, which is what I was expecting. When meeting with the same friends who inspired me to knit that shawl, they also told me that holding two strands of lace yarn together to make these mittens was more similar to the idea of shooting yourself in the face than not. But lace yarn is what I have. In abundance. So lace yarn was what it was going to be.

They had a point though. If I had just wound up some lace yarn and tried to hold it together from the outside and inside, I probably would have gone into complete madness. What I did instead was I wound one ball, then two… somewhat equal in size balls (I sort of eyeballed that one and that’s something I should have just invested in a scale on) and then wound those two balls together.

The hard part was the stupid pattern. Which wasn’t very well written, so I got very frustrated trying to figure it out. To preface, there were some things already not working out for me. Like, basic instructions for anything lately make me cry. Oh man, so do random commercials, like this one:

But there were also things in this pattern that were just weird. Like instead of the standard K1, it would be written 1 K. I got the vibe the person who wrote it didn’t speak English. There was a random small error on one of the charts and while that’s not usually a big deal to me, it was here. Probably because they charged a price like it was going to be a thorough and well written pattern and what I got was not that.

Still, despite my grumping and griping, they turned out better than I could have imagined. People who have seen them remarked on the color combo- well that was all Miranda. I was trying to be sneaky and asked her which colors she liked together from the yarn that I had and she paired the navy with the green. In the end, despite all the worrying and sweating over minor details, these mittens are probably my favorite thing I knit in 2012.