Snow Bunnies!

Nope, there is no snow to be found in Chicago this week. It is January 31 and 55 degrees!

Before I officially started working on my UFOs mentioned in the last post, I made a mitten for Sifu, the yarn store here in Chicago that I kind of work for. I make store samples when she needs them, including the felted bracelets from this post last year.

This may have been the most unexpectedly time-consuming project I’ve ever knit. Thankfully, it was just a mitten so it couldn’t have taken up too much time, but just one mitten took about 20 hours! By hour 16 or so, I was pretty irritated actually! Fine yarn, tiny double-pointed needles, and the fair-isle stranded knitting technique made for one putzy project. The wool yarn was old and scratchy and stuck together while I twisted the yarns to make the images of bunnies. The yarns got stuck between the needles too. The yarn was a mish-mash of different weaving wools, so the varying thickness and different twist directions of the yarns made for a slightly lumpy surface. So, not only was this project putzy, it didn’t even look nice. 

 

After blocking the mitten, my tune really changed! The mitten isn’t perfect, but after a good press under a damp towel, it really did turn out to be sweet. Since the yarns were varying thicknesses, the bunnies didn’t show up quite as well as I had hoped, but I think it’s okay. That really is my only disappointment about the finished object. Oh, and that my wedding ring gets stuck on the yarns inside. It looks like I won’t be doing many fair-isle mittens for myself in the future. We just can't have that.