I know they're not really exciting, since that last picture you saw of them was when they were almost finished. Since I finished these mittens, I decided to focus solely on Chelsea's scarflet and finish that. I blocked it, which was magic. I have the Vogue Knitting book, which has lots of information about pretty much anything you could ever want to know about knitting. A section of this book discusses the different ways to block a garment, and I chose to wet block the scarflet. This involved me pinning the scarflet out to the correct dimensions on my ironing board, and then spritzing it with a spray bottle until it was damp. Then, I let it sit overnight, and got up early the next morning to rescue it from the ironing board before my husband unpinned it and undid all of my blocking in order to iron his clothes for work. After rescuing it, I discovered that it was no longer curly! Before blocking, the sides curled in and touched each other, which made the scarflet look kind of funny. After wet blocking, it was lovely and flat. I felt very good about myself. Then, I just had to knit a couple more rows in order to get the button holes on the scarflet, and then sew the buttons on. Voila!
There should be a picture of the finished scarflet here, but I forgot to take one before I gave it to Chelsea, and now that I've finally finished it, it's too warm for her to wear it.
The next project I started working on was a pair of mittens for my sister's boyfriend that were supposed to be for Christmas past, but she didn't ask me to make them until after Christmas, so I feel like I'm pretty much off the hook. He has really big hands.
This is my hand on top of the first mitten. I'm a little worried now, because I don't have small hands, and I didn't realize that the mittens were quite this large. Fortunately, my husband also has really big hands, so he gets to try on everything that I make. I told him that I was very lucky to have him, since I'm a smallish person, and he's a largeish person, so between the two of us we should be able to make anything to size! He was not as excited about that prospect.
The second mitten's cuff is in progress. After I knit the second mitten, I'll knit the thumbs. I save the thumbs to do at the same time, because for whatever reason, once I get to the thumbs I'm really confused. To prevent two different times of being confused, I simply knit the thumbs one right after the other so I can get weirded out on the first thumb but know what I'm doing for the second. One time when I went to do the thumbs, I forgot whether I was supposed to knit them in the round clockwise or counter-clockwise, and ended up knitting the first thumb inside out. I'm not sure why I have so much trouble with thumbs, but maybe if I keep making mittens I'll finally figure it out.
I wish I had something to show you from my sewing life. I have, in fact, been sewing. We are participating in the Maine Shop Hop, and each participating shop needs to make a sample out of the chosen line of fabric. I have been trying very hard to make samples, but each time has been, no exaggerating, an abject failure. I'm pretty okay with this, because I get a feeling in my stomach when starting a project if it's going to turn out poorly, and I pretty much just try to suppress it and plow through. So, I now have a couple of weird looking star blocks to show for it, and we have decided to do a sample from a pattern rather than from my head, and perhaps my mom will sew it, just to be safe. Pictures of sewing will come, I promise!
I hope you are all able to enjoy the sun a little bit. Hold onto hope, spring is coming!
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