Winter Midnight Mitts

CJKopec - Midnight
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Here's another November leftover! This skein of yarn was spun from a lovely batt of blue fiber made by C. J. Kopec. I separated out the dark, medium and light portions and spun them in sequence and then did a great technique called "Navajo plying" which turns one strand of yarn into chains of three where the color order is preserved. This means my skein of yarn turns slowly from white to dark blue over its entire length.

Here's two of the three batts spun up and wound in preparation for knitting. This project was a SAL/KAL, which meant that everyone bought the same fiber and then knit along with each other on the same project (or rather two projects in this case, so you had a choice). I planned on making Winter Twilight Mitts (You may need a login to follow this link, I'm not certain). Rather than spin contrasting colors from these batts, I went and purchased some black mill-spun yarn (Malabrigo Sock in "Negro") to use as my second color. There's some small risk in this since the weight and twist may not match up perfectly. But I really don't like spinning black, and I wasn't sure the dark blue would contrast enough with the other two blues from this batt to make spinning both colors worth it.

The mitts are great fun to knit! It helps that I was able to take a class from my LYS on multi-color knitting. We learned about both Fair Isle knitting (stranded) and intarsia (blocks of color). In this case, the Fair Isle techniques were really handy. One great trick when knitting in the round is to turn your work inside out and knit across the back (inside) of the item, rather than the front (outside). This stretches your "floats" (the spare yarn you're not currently knitting) around a larger circumference and keeps them loose so they won't cause your knitting to pucker in odd ways.

Here's the finished mitts! I've added very long cuffs to the top. They are quite squishy and delectably soft, but the best part is that I can roll them up over my fingers so that they are more like full mittens in the cold morning weather. It makes holding onto the steering wheel of the care much more enjoyable. And then as the day warms, I just roll them right back and can operate my phone properly (which requires a bare fingertip to dial).

Finally, we have the last batt spun up. This one I did not separate and I plied with three singles together (not chain). I have around 120 yards, plus another 80 or so left over from the mitts in mini-skeins of white and dark blue. I think I will be knitting a small cowl or necklet of some sort to coordinate with the mitts and my fabulous red jacket I got for Christmas!