Fingerless MIttens

I received the samples to knit for the cruise in November. The yarns are luscious, high-quality merino or merino blends and patterns are fairly easy.

I knit up these fingerless mitts in a couple of binge-watchings of the Danish political drama, 'Borgen'.

I mirrored the cables, knit a few extra rows before binding off the main part of the mitten and a few extra rows on the thumb.

The kits come with single point needles to the mittens are knit flat and then seamed. I thought I did a pretty good job on the seam. I'm thinking of providing dpns so the thumb can be knit in the round rather than flat and then seamed.

I have also started the cable rib scarf. Basically it's a K3 P3 rib that travels by shifting one stitch every three rows.

On closer inspection,I realized I had purled a couple of knit stitches about 25 rows down. I ran the corresponding stitch down vertically and fixed it. Then I realized I could have done a blog post about fixing it rather than frogging about an hour's knitting. So I looked for some other mistake whose repair I could chronicle.

I found one. It wasn't a huge mistake but enough of one to bug me. I had split a stitch which left about half of the stitch as an unsightly loop on the face of the fabric.

It was pretty easy to determine which stitch it was by counting over to the edge from the error. Then I slipped the stitches up to that stitch on the other needle and let it run down to the mistake. I then took a crochet hook and laddered back up to the top knitwise, turning to the other side as I encountered purl stitches.

Fixed!  I was fortunate that the pattern was not a complex one, lace or cables, for example. Now there's nothing to interrupt the flow of the pattern. The process looks a lot scarier than it is. The worst that can happen is the repair looks crappy and you have to frog all those rows anyway - and that sometimes happens with my knitting. This time, though, it worked just fine.

 

As the yarn is lovely 100% merino - a natural animal fibre - I have been spit-splicing to join a new skein. I mark the start of the new skein with a stitch marker on the selvage. The scarf is going to be about 64" long.