Koru mitts

Well my yarn from Holst Garn arived on Saturday, I spent the day swatching with the 100% wool and getting to know it a little better. It is soft after washing in soak, but not as soft as we merino-spoilt kiwis are used to. It has a nice drape on 3mm needles, a decently firm fabric on 2.5mm, I knit it double on 3.75mm too, but I think I would go to 4mm if I were using it double. The yarn actually knits quite nicely double stranded and once it is blocked you'd never be able to tell it was two strands of a finer yarn. I'm also working a lace sample on the 3.75, but that has been set aside from my other project, the koru mitts.

On seeing the green I decided that it needed to become something foresty and New Zealandish, so I did a search for koru, fern, spiral.. couldn't find anything on Ravelry or google. Plan B, design my own! Well this is where I astound everyone with my superior design wowness... or in other words show how easy it is to create something utter fail.

Firstly the yarn, see how pretty it is! Really, I have never bought yarn that has compelled me so deeply to photograph it. Now I have to buy more, purely for the artsy yarn shots I can imagine in rustic hand made baskets and olde fashioned kitchen scales.

See PRETTY! I just love the transparent label giving you a glimpse of the yarn beneath, it's totally boudoir dressing for yarn!

So I have a deep olivey green and a soft pale fawny shade, and over on Ravelry in the fingerless gloves group there is a colourwork KAL (knit along) The occasion calls for a new pattern. Firstly I google, I'm looking for images of tree ferns to inspire me, after looking for half an hour or so I decide nothing works and that I am better off going for a less literal translation of a fern, so I doodle on paper a bit. My favorite graph paper for knitting patterns is from knitonthenet you can to create your own graph paper to the gage -you- knit to and then you can print it out.

I just draw my picture lightly on the paper and then start pixelating it. I decided for this pattern that I will embroider the central spine of the leaf since I wanted to keep a graceful curve and it wasn't going to work in small squares. The pattern fits into 30 stitches width, which works in with my guesstimated 60 stitches around for the body of the mitts. Only knitting a full swatch will really tell me for sure.

I couldn't decide if I wanted a pretty lacey edge, or a corrugated ribbed edge, I figured corrugated rib would actually be pretty boring since there are only two colours, and corrugated ribbing only really shines when there are a few shades in play. So I went searching for lace edgings. I found one called aspen leaf, though in other places it is called oak leaf and in this place I shall call it Fern because that is what it looks like to me. See the prettiness in unblocked state. This is knitted in the holst garn chalk colourway

The repeats are 10 rows each, since you generally pick up every second row in a knitted border, I figured that I'd need to knit 12 repeats, or 120 rows.. whoa, wrong! I guess if I wanted frilly ruffled kind of glove edging, but hey I am not -that- feminine. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong actually, all the other patterns I could find that used a knitted lace edging, indicated that you would pick up one stitch for every two rows of the edging. I came to the conclusion that I didn't want to knit my edging in the same way because I wanted my lace edging to open up more. So I ripped back the edge to 8 repeats.

So how to turn 80 rows into 60 picked up stitches. I came to a simple formula ( Finally kindergarten maths pays off!) pick up one stitch in every row for three rows, then skip one. Yeah ok so I'm not up for any nobel peace prizes or anything, but it was one of those eureka moments that gave me a moment of smug satisfaction.

Now I have some fiddling to do, I need to figure out where to begin my thumb shaping, how many increases to make and where to end it so it sits comfortably on my thumb. But none of that is happening until after I have sliced up my cucumbers for a batch of bread and butter pickles.