In Order for a Blog to be Interesting . . .

. . .the blog author has to be doing or saying something interesting. Some of the books I was reading were very interesting, but since I'd rather eat ants than write book reviews, it didn't make for very interesting blog posting!

Our goofy weather cooled off a bit yesterday, and I felt more like knitting mittens for Julie's Strikke-Along. (I find it hard to knit mittens, especially double-layered ones, when it's 79 degrees F. out.)

This is the invisible cast-on I'm using for these mittens, whatever name you know it by: the cast-on where you use a piece of scrap yarn and pick up live stitches later.

And here we are picking up the live stitches, three on the needle to the right, and four visible still on the cream scrap yarn.

After I picked all the bottom stitches up, I purled them for four rows in the cream yarn, and then folded the cuff in half and picked up alternate stitches, just like in my earlier post on the first cuff.

And here we are at two mitten cuffs!

Now I am at a decision point. I'll have to increase these to fit my palm, and decide if I am going to lay in scrap yarn and knit after-thought thumbs, or create a thumb gusset.

Traditional Scandinavian mittens use gauntlet cuffs that go over the coat sleeve. I signed up for "Strikke-Lite" because I knew I would be wandering off into the weeds a bit as far as "tradition" went: I like long, snug mitten cuffs; I'm using much thicker yarn than, say, the Latvian mittens from the Riga Summit; and so I'm simplifying the patterning drastically.

If you're reading this, dear brother D., it's a complete coincidence that the mitten colors match Michigan State's!