Presenting – Orange Herring

So I haven’t yet typed up my 2010 knitting goals for the world to see, but I finally sewed these up, washed them, and waited days for them to dry before finally putting a hair dryer to them.

Ta-da! Awesome orange mittens. I’m heartily bemused by the comments on these mittens—here and on Flickr. You see, the yarn here has a story. I didn’t pick it up myself, but an old friend decided one day to send me things I might like. I only know this friend online, but apparently the force of my personality comes through so starkly that he picked out the best colors to match *me*.

Which makes me happy.

I’ve been carrying around this yarn for a couple of years now, Brown Sheep Naturespun Worsted, and trying to figure out what will make it the best. I knew I wanted something in colourwork (because I’m obsessed). It was hard to come up with a pattern and I kept wanting to do something really ambitious, but honestly? These two colors go together so well that the simplicity of the pattern just lets them do their thing.

And that thing is bring brightness and happiness to the world.

So go new mittens. (Which I desperately needed, as my only pair of mittens wore a big hole in the thumb the second week of December in Minnesota.)

orange herring (Ravelry):
Pattern: Herringbone Mittens by Elli Stubenrauch
Yarn: Brown Sheep Nature Spun Worsted, orange and red-brown
Needles: US 5 / 3.75mm and US 3 / 3.25mm. I probably would have done better had I gone with the “women’s medium” sizes of US4 and US2, but I really didn’t want to go that small with the gauge. Too much trouble.

However, one of the nice things of having real mittens right now is being able to measure my hand against it. Whilst mittens should be somewhat looser than the actual hand fitting inside them, these, with the exception of the thumbs, are far too big. But now I have two mittens to compare my hands to, so the next time I knit myself mittens (hopefully not long now as I’ve found how quick and easy they are!) they won’t be so big! I’m a little surprised at how close-fitting the thumbs are, to tell the truth. Those are most definitely snug.

So—what do you thing is next? Bird in Hand? Or any of the number of mittens in my Ravelry queue or favorites? Time will tell!

(January 11 and first FO post of 2010… I’m so on a roll here!)

Tags: colourwork, mittens

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Finished 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.