I have developed a deep love for cabled mittens. I mean, mittens in general are enough to give me warm fuzzies, but there's something about cabled mittens that calls for extra love. Especially if the cable is combined with seed stitch:
I knit these on my break between the end of classes and the beginning of my summer research. Most of what I owned was packed up in storage, and I hadn't brought nearly enough knitting patterns, so these are cobbled together of what I could remember of Knitty's Mittens 101, plus braided cable and seed stitch (inspired by Ryan's cable and seed stitch mittens from 2005). Seed stitch is the other thing I've recently fallen in love with. <3!
Anyway, yesterday I started a pair of adult-sized cabled mittens, this time with no seed stitch, but fancier cables. Look, an in-progress picture!
I've finished the first one now, and it looks really cool. Also, I've now learned how to a) read a chart (hey, I told you I'm a beginner), and b) cable without a cable needle. I decided to learn the latter because that rope cable requires crossing every other row, and I really needed a more efficient way to do that. All three of these pairs of mittens will be bound for Dulaan by mid-June.
Also, I finally sewed together all of the fish that I spent last semester knitting! I just didn't have time during finals, so I've had this bag of multi-colored fish sitting around. The sewing was not as bad as you'd think--I just whip-stitched everything together, and since all the fish had a slip-stitch selvedge, it wasn't hard. I am amazed, though, at just how much it looks like something your grandma knit. Oy vey.
This was made with some of the yarn that was donated when I started a campus Dulaan drive. I got a huge trash bag full of cheap acrylic yarn, all of which appears to have been manufactured before I was born. Because it's acrylic, the jury's still out on whether or not I'll actually send this to Dulaan. I double-stranded the yarn to make the fish thicker (and the finished blanket weighs a ton), but I don't know how warm it will be even so. The alternative is to donate it to the local chapter of Project Linus, and I'm really conflicted. Dulaan has been my "thing", but if it doesn't meet the main goal (warmth), and it does meet the main goal of a stateside charity (machine-washablity) . . . it's a tough call. We'll see.
