Purple Mitten Progress

I finally knitted the last few rows of the cuffs on my husband's purple mittens.

Now I have picked up the stitches for the thumbs. I went down two needle sizes (from US 3 to US 1) to knit the thumbs, and my size 1 knitting needles happen to be purple! Purple needles in purple yarn don't show up very well.

I double-knitted these from the finger tips down, and now I am double-knitting the thumbs from the base to the tip. This is one of my favorite uses of double-knitting: making a small-diameter tube. However, it does get a little awkward as the thumb gets longer. Someone described the movement of the mitten as you knit the thumb as "twirling a baby elephant on a trapeze", a mental image that made me laugh, and it was so apt!

I did a couple of repeats on the very tiny tatting. But despite using my camera's "Best quality" mode, I can't get good pictures of it. Tomorrow if I don't get too busy, I might go through the rigamarole necessary to use my husband's computer and scan it. That will give me a good-quality .JPG about the size of the Upper Peninsula.

Other Notes

Along the route I usually take to drive my son to school, a farm field is being developed. The lime that was dumped at the edge has been bulldozed out of the way, and all kinds of heavy earth-moving machinery is sitting all over the field.

This morning I noticed that the neighbor's chickens were strutting around on one of the piles of earth. Such a funny mixed image, the rural flock of chickens let out in the morning to peck in the dirt, and the development.