Rainbow Redux

Once upon a time, my son gave me some rainbow yarn for Christmas, and I knitted him some mittens.

He's grown out of them, and I was never 100% happy with the ribbing. Then the other day, he was wearing my mittens.

So I got this bright idea: why didn't I just frog back past the thumbs, knit them a bit longer, and make mittens that would fit me and be just a bit big on him?

Like a lot of my bright ideas, this turned out to be much easier to think up than to do in actual real-life knitting.

The biggest snag was that my hands are a lot wider across the palm than around the fingers, so I had to increase to make them fit. I didn't want to frog all the way back to the mitten tip, but the three different increases I tried below that point all looked ugly.

I finally ended up frogging them clear back to the fingertips and increasing back there.

The next snag I'm facing is that I have two little mitten thumbs, all pre-knitted, and with a little effort I can knit them longer. I already know (because I tried this, in one of the frogged increase incarnations) that I can join them on to the mitten body, using a three-needle bind-off on half of the stitches.

But will I be happy with the edges of that join? Gah! I have a feeling there will be a lot more knitting and frogging on this little project in my future!

This time around, I'm using shiny little KnitPicks 2.5mm needles in the finger section, and planning to switch to 2.75mm needles below there. No snow will be coming through these mittens!

And speaking of no snow, what we have at the moment is gray and rainy. It's supposed to get colder in the afternoon, change from rain to snow, and get windy. We'll see!