Saturday, April 23, 2011

Winter Wonder Mittens from FiberWild! - Day 1

I have met the Alpacas who will warm my hands.  I love that.  It’s like the Michael Pollan of fiber...I’ve gone and traced my way back to the origins of my food cycle or something.  I know this fiber’s origin (or at least its friends--I can’t actually say for certain that I’ve met Grant and Washington, but I’ve chummed it up with their herd for sure).
At first I was sure this yarn would be too fine.  Who wants lacy mittens?  I always think mittens must be dense and sturdy, but these Winter Wonder Mittens have a delicate quality to them.  I had forgotten the extra layer colorwork creates by carrying the second color along behind the first.  And alpaca is very warm despite feeling very light and astoundingly soft.  I suspect once these are blocked, they’ll be quite snuggly.  Right now they are promising to be beautiful.
This is not television knitting.  Attention must be paid when working a pattern like this.  You need the little post-it note trick, keeping track of you rows and stitches.  It’s like lace work in that regard. I ended up blocking the pattern into 10-stitch quadrants and putting stitch markers every ten inches so that I was only checking 10 stitches at a time, not an entire row’s worth of non-repeating pattern.

I'm excited, and looking forward to the rest of this project.

3 comments:

Bonnie said...

It looks lovely thus far!

Sarah M. Anderson said...

I love meeting the alpacas who warm your hands!

Sarah M. Anderson said...

I love meeting the alpaca who warms your hands! That's great!