Warm fingers

A couple of years ago, I knitted sweet little woolen mittens for the girls. They were pink and chocolate brown variegated yarn. I felted them down so that they would be nice and dense. And then, Rana proceeded to lose every one of them over the next couple of months. At school, at a park out of town, who knows where else. I think we ended up with one mitten; it was the designated spare as it had turned out a slightly different size than the rest.

Since then, the kids had been wearing those little stretchy dollar store gloves. Those are fine for chilly days, but when it starts getting cold, they’re just too thin to be of any benefit. Besides that, my kids managed to lose one glove from each of about six pairs.

Rather than spend money on new mittens, I dug around through my yarn bin and found most of a skein of Lion Brand Wool-Ease in an odd sage green color. I don’t remember buying this. I can’t think of what I have used it for in the past since it wasn’t a full skein. Why do I have this? Where did it come from? And what happened to those few yards of it? There are no answers.

Utilitarian mittens.

Wool-Ease is an acrylic-wool blend (70%-30% I think, but I don’t know because the wrapper was also missing). I won’t be able to felt anything with this, but I am hoping that there is enough wool content to keep small hands warm and dry. In all of my crochet patterns, I couldn’t find one for child-sized mittens. There were baby mittens and adult mittens, but what about for a five-year old girl? Nada. I didn’t want to use the knitting board pattern again because, without felting, the stitches are prone to snagging (learned that the hard way with a pair of tiny mittens that I made for Konik). I found this pattern via Crochet Pattern Central. It works the mittens in one long, continuous piece, forming ribs the length of the mitten. It looks very crocheted and homemade. Stylistically, it’s not my favorite, but the pattern was easy to do and easy to size up, since it turned out to be written for baby size (where are the kids’ sizes?!). It may look cuter in a better color.

To make them a little more “fancy,” I stitched X’s up the middle rib on the back of each mitten using crochet thread. Granota protested about me crocheting a string to keep the mittens together. She may not like it, but I’m going to do it anyways. I don’t need any more lost mittens!

They look huge, but her fingers really are that long.

Next up, mittens for Rana. We’ll see what I find in my yarn bin!