Mitten!

So yeah, that was a little odd, huh? I seriously didn't want to get all serious on you folks - actually, I hate it. I feel like I might just put off the ten who read my selfish words almost daily if I jump on the sad wagon. I'm not, by the way. Jumping on any sort of wagon. You know, just so you know.

So! On to happier things, ok?

On the knitting front, I successfully almost completed my first mitten. I've decided to leave them fingerless. I'm not (just) being lazy. I look at it this way - these are mittens I'm knitting for myself. Pour moi. Why should I conform to the needs of the rest of the world, when I know damn well I would get way more use out of mittens with no fingers?

When I started knitting, I wasn't sure whether I'd end up with my fingers covered or not, but it didn't really matter:



I've pictured it with my Vioxx (rofecoxib) mug.* This picture was taken yesterday afternoon.

*Best pharmacy freebie ever, eh? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Earlier today, I worked on the mitten a little more:



As you can see, it goes pretty fast.

I was a little worried about making the thumb - but as it turns out, I didn't have to worry about that part just yet. I only had to knit nine stitches with scrap yarn (just six inches or so of yarn that I'm not using for anything else in a contrasting color):



Then you slip those stitches back onto the left needle from the right, and then knit into the scrap stitches ("strawberry") with the working yarn ("asparagus"). [Hmm. I think it sounds way harder than it actually is.]

I did that, and here's a closeup of what it looks like (scrap yarn was "strawberry"):



One thing I absolutely love about his pattern and the colors is that even though I effed it up a little bit (pattern called for "petal" and I used "rhubarb", pattern called for "honey" and I used "harvest")[Is anyone else getting hungry?], I like it better than I liked the original. It's more bold, it's more colorful, and it's more "me".

At any rate, I got to the end of the thumb, and decided that there was no way I'd ever get half as much use out of mittens as I would out of mittens. So I worked enough rounds of the dot pattern to reach almost to the base of my fingers, and did a purl row, followed by six rows of knit stitches. This creates the fantastic rolled edge you can see here:



That's the closest you'll get to a finished object until I do the thumb. Wish me luck. God knows how I will manage to mangle that. [PS: There are about a million ends hanging out, but for this picture I stuffed them all underneath the mitten. Where the scrap yarn is, just in case you were worried about it disappearing on you. I hid it all! The joy of blogging, it knows no bounds!]