Completed Project | Smitten Kitten Mittens

Pattern: MissyC by JennyPenny.
Yarn: Jamieson & Smith, 2ply Jumper Weight
54 Charcoal Grey, 1A Off White

I always find gift knitting a challenge. It’s never challenging to find patterns, or choosing yarn. The challenge is in the giving away. It’s the year of 30th birthdays amongst my school friends, meaning a year of parties and general confusion as to how we made it to 30?! These fabulous mittens were so hard to give away but I knew the delight on Naomi’s face would make up for my loss. Here is her cat Hendrick. She loves her cat.

The shape is a traditional nordic style mitten with the triangle top, a simple shape which makes it easy to concentrate on the colourwork. And concentrate I had to! The colourwork is charted and I kept track using washi tape. I made sure to twist the colours every 3 or 4 stitches so there wouldn’t be any floats that could catch, there was a lots of this so every few rows I had to untwist the yarns from each other.
The black detailing I did knit in. I just sort of fudged it along, pulled the yarn down the rows as needed. It looked pretty messy on the back and I had quite a few end to weave in at the end but it was dense enough that it all pulled together, there was no danger of loose single stitches. The other colours, the green eyes and pink nose, I swiss darned on afterwards. It was a wonderful transformation adding the eyes and nose. They suddenly came to life!

Jamieson & Smith’s 2 ply Jumper Weight is my go to yarn for any colourwork. The range of colours and the final dense, soft fabric has such a warmth nothing quite compares.