Pity the Icebreaker Festival

One of the closest communities to where I live is South Haven, which is having their "Icebreaker Festival" this weekend, with an ice-carving competition, the Western Michigan University synchronized skating team, and chili cook-offs.

I don't think much ice will be broken this weekend. The weather forecast this morning says

Winter storm warning is cancelled.

Blizzard warning in effect until 10 pm est this evening.

Then it goes on to say cheerful things like "...additional accumulations of 3 to 6 inches anticipated. West winds will begin gusting to 40 mph this afternoon and continue into the early evening," and

"Today:
Windy. Snow showers. Blowing snow. Bitterly cold. Snow accumulation 2 to 5 inches. Highs 10 to 15. Temperatures steady or slowly falling in the afternoon. West winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent. Wind chill readings 5 below to 15 below zero."

A good day to stay indoors and knit our son a new pair of mittens!

The yarn is beautiful rainbow-colored Red Heart. It was my Christmas present from our son, who thought of it himself and dragged his dad off to buy it. Acrylic yarn makes great mittens for kids who sometimes play in late-winter snow that is as much mud as it is snow!

I am knitting these very tightly, so he can make snowballs in them and not have the snow coming through the stitches. That means they are stiff as a board. They are also just a bit big, the easier to ball his cold fingers up into the palm of the hand. In an inch or so, I'll lay in a thread using Elizabeth Zimmermann's "thumb trick" from the back of her Knitter's Almanac, and after I've knitted the rest of the mittens and their cuffs, I'll go back and pick up those stitches to knit the thumbs.

Mittens were the first thing I ever knitted in the round on double-pointed knitting needles. I had a couple of patterns, but mostly I just figured out how big they needed to be by trying them on. First I knitted my son two pairs of blaze-orange mittens, then I knitted myself a pair out of Wool-Ease.

The nice thing about knitting your own mittens is that you can have the cuffs exactly as long and as loose or tight as you like them. In weather like this, I especially don't want any gap between my coat sleeve and my mitten cuff, so I made my own mitten cuffs fairly long.

And now I smell bacon, so it's time to go eat and then work on rainbow mittens!