Knitting Tales: Oven Mitts
Okay, a bit disappointed on several counts.
First of all, the Cascade red I used bled into the white, so the white is now sort of an anemic pink. The red also bleached out a bit, so it all ended up looking a bit used and shabby. The pic doesn’t do this justice, it looks much darker and brighter than the mitts actually are. Worst of all, for some reason the thumbs did not shrink down as much as they should have, and are much, much too long.
Well, let’s face it, to a lesser degree the mitts themselves didn’t shrink as much as they should have, and they are a bit too long in the body, too. And the snowflake one narrowed a bit too much at the design level, so it’s a bit warped.
On the positive side, the felting is exactly the right thickness, so that the mitt is fairly flexible and yet there’s no way that any heat is going to get through. You could hold a roasting pan straight from the oven in your hands for an hour, and you wouldn’t feel anything through those puppies.
Too bad I don’t have time to make shorter mitts. They is what they is, baby.
Two for Auntie and Unca (the red & green matched set), one for my eldest cousin and his lovely wife (the pink snowflake). The other cousins get game stuff for Christmas.
I wonder which cousins will feel they got the best end of the stick.
Ah, well. Nothing’s perfect. But some things are done with lots of love.
Shut up about the Road to Hell…
First of all, the Cascade red I used bled into the white, so the white is now sort of an anemic pink. The red also bleached out a bit, so it all ended up looking a bit used and shabby. The pic doesn’t do this justice, it looks much darker and brighter than the mitts actually are. Worst of all, for some reason the thumbs did not shrink down as much as they should have, and are much, much too long.
Well, let’s face it, to a lesser degree the mitts themselves didn’t shrink as much as they should have, and they are a bit too long in the body, too. And the snowflake one narrowed a bit too much at the design level, so it’s a bit warped.
On the positive side, the felting is exactly the right thickness, so that the mitt is fairly flexible and yet there’s no way that any heat is going to get through. You could hold a roasting pan straight from the oven in your hands for an hour, and you wouldn’t feel anything through those puppies.
Too bad I don’t have time to make shorter mitts. They is what they is, baby.
Two for Auntie and Unca (the red & green matched set), one for my eldest cousin and his lovely wife (the pink snowflake). The other cousins get game stuff for Christmas.
I wonder which cousins will feel they got the best end of the stick.
Ah, well. Nothing’s perfect. But some things are done with lots of love.
Shut up about the Road to Hell…
posted by Eileen at 12:35 PM
3 Comments:
Bummer about the felting oddities. When I made oven mitts, I had the opposite problem - the hand and thumb felted too much in length, and looked suitable only for people whose hands were malformed or stumpy...
This was, after more than 20 years of knitting, the first felting I've ever done. So there were a few salient points that I wasn't entirely certain of that turned out to be key. I made a 'sample mitt' from a pattern I found on the net (sorry, can't remember exactly where at the moment, and I'm too tired to get up to look for the paper it's written on), which called for one strand of worsted. It got to the right size, but seemed a bit on the thin side, material-wise. So I made these three with doubled strands *plus* stranded patterns in a double strand (no heat getting through those puppies at the key points), but the only adjustment I made to the pattern was to widen the body and thumb by a few stitches each. Which wasn't a bad idea, that part came out right.
What I didn't know was that doubling the strands (and perhaps that quadruple layer at the pattern) would significantly change the shortening of the piece... that in fact it would shrink *less* than the single-strand mitt.
And of course our washer is front loading, so I had to wait to use my mom's washer to felt the mitts, so in my IT state of Yuletide Knitting Panic, I decided to wait until I was done with all the pieces (that I could finish) before felting them... so it was much too late to change anything by the time I realized my mistake. The gift recipients are going to have to put up with what they got.
I'll do better next time... well, there's several modifications I want to make, actually, which would actually make the mitts MY own original pattern.
Does one pattern for (beautiful) mittens and one pattern for oven mitts make me a designer?
Any chance you'd share your basic oven mitt pattern? The pic is beautiful.
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