Woodland Winter Mittens

So, last year, I swooned over and succumbed to KnitPicks’s
Woodland Winter Mittens and bought the yarn and patterns for all 6 designs…in
both color ways!  Well. I wanted
options.  And they were sooooo
beautiful….sigh….see, I’m swooning again….

I made it almost all the way through one mitten when… gee, I
guess it was Christmas Knitting that hit full blast about then.  Anyhow, this fall, I dug it out and finished
the body of the mitten.  Then – feeling
pretty darned optimistic about actually completing the mate to it before the
cold weather (and Christmas Knitting) hit – I turned my attention to the
thumb.  The thumb, like the body of the
mitten, is made from a charted pattern in stranded (Fair
Isle) knitting.  20 little stitches
on dpns, round and round according to the chart.  Precise and fiddly, but worth it in order to
have a patterned thumb.

After I closed off the top of the thumb, I slid the mitten
on, shoving my thrum gently into the mitten thumb.  Then, not so gently.  And it still didn’t go in.  Well, there were all those strands and all –
so I turned the mitten inside-out and gave it a go.  I could barely get my thumb in at all – and
the stitches around the base were pulling and gaping.  I stretched the knitting, rubbed it, wiggled
my thumb.  Even inside-out it was too
tight.  Even for my scrawny thumb.  Sigh (not the swoony sigh this time!).

Well, no choice.  It
was either re-do the thumb or give up on the mitten.  So, I started to rip back the thumb, but each
fingering-weight wooly stitch clung to every stitch near it so tenaciously that
I decided to just chop the darn thing off! 
So I did.  Whoa!  How is that for gutsy?!

Then, I raveled the last (or first, if you think of it that
way) row of thumb stitches and began slipping the remaining live stitches onto
needles.  Harder than it sounds.  I had rather a ratty mess on my hands.  Well, I got a lot on stitches on the needles
(remember, these are fingering-weight stitches – in mostly black – which are
about the size of ant legs).  And then I
realized that I had to turn the whole thing right-side-out!

Another deep non-swoony sigh (that sounded rather like a
cuss word, I’m afraid).  Slip the
stitches from the needles to a holder and contort the whole mess back right-side-out.  Then, using the chart as a guide, hunt for
the remaining stitches.  Miraculously, I
did find all the stitches and managed to secure them on needles.  But then it was back to the drawing board.

Y’see, I had to re-write the chart to accommodate the 6
additional stitches I estimated were necessary to make the thumb large
enough.  So, out came the graph paper and
colored pencils.  I made up a new thumb
chart and knit the new thumb. 

Annnnnd….it fit!!

Like a glove, er, mitten.

And it is sooooo beautiful. 
Swoony sigh….

Today the cold weather and
Christmas knitting hit – but I am holding out hope for the second mitten.