Mitten for Scale

It's hard to wrap your mind around 20 stitches per inch.

So here is my unblocked one-inch, twenty-stitch swatch on top of the double-knitted snowflake mittens at about 5.5 stitches per inch.

The swatch is in both pictures, hard to notice in the left one.

Picking up the stitches for double-knitted thumbs was an adventure!

It's not that hard in single-layer mittens, but picking them up on an outside layer and an inside one was different. Challenging.

I did something when I laid in the yarn for the thumb stitches that turned out to be A Good Idea: First I knitted the outside stitches and slipped the inside ones with the scrap yarn (the reddish yarn in the photo), then I turned and knitted the inside stitches and slipped the outside scrap-yarn ones.

This turned out to be a good idea because it let me pick up the outside stitches first, pulling out the scrap yarn as I did so. Then I could pick up the inside stitches on a second needle. Finally I could take both layers onto a third needle.

In the photo, on the left I have the knit outside stitches picked up and have pulled out all but the last two scrap-yarn stitches.

In the center, I have all the knit stitches picked up. All the knit-stitch (outside layer) scrap yarn is pulled out. I've picked up the purl stitches (inside layer) on the bottom layer, but the purl-stitch scrap yarn is still in them.

On the right, I've taken the knit and purl stitches on the bottom of the thumb hole onto one needle. On the top of the thumb hole, I have the outside and inside stitches still on two needles, waiting to be taken onto a third needle.

(And I'm going to be thankful for this post some day when I try this again and can't remember what the bejabbers I did!)

And I was relieved to be able to poke my thumbs out through the thumb holes and find out that they fell in the right spot!

I generally prefer to knit tip-down mittens, because when the mitten gets long enough to hit the thumb webbing, I know I can lay in the scrap yarn and the mitten will be long enough.

These were cuff-up mittens, and I did a lot of laying them next to my other mittens, measuring, holding them against my hand, and sweating over whether I had put the thumb hole in a good spot.

Next, knitting the thumbs!