(Nearly) Nothing But Mitts

It's been a while since I've seen something I really wanted to knit, so in the meantime, in between sewing and embroidery projects, I've been using up leftovers of Cascade 220 to make fingerless mitts. As long as I have 55 grams, I can make a pair of Evangelines, modified just the way I like them (a little bit wider, and with a thumb gusset).

(Really, these mitts look so much better on hands.)

This picture is missing the ruby red pair I already dropped off to school for the silent auction. I've lost count of how many times I've knitted this pattern, but it's so many that it's basically mindless knitting for me, even with that cable chart--which is very intuitive and not that hard to begin with. I tried another pattern recently, and I'm sure the pattern itself was fine, but it wasn't this pattern, and I lost track during the thumb gusset increases and missed a cable cross and finally admitted to myself that, darn it, I like the pattern I like and I really don't need to branch out. So I frogged those and used the yarn to make the blue mitts at the end of the row there.

So what am I going to do with them all? (Because I still have leftover Cascade 220 in a couple other colors.) I put them in the bin to save until December, when they make good teacher gifts or bus driver gifts or oops! I need a last-minute gift gifts. I already gave a pair to each of my boys' teachers, and my younger son's teacher had them on almost every day at pick-up (doesn't a knitter love that!). She told me that in all her teaching years, no-one had ever knitted her something. I sort of have the idea that by the time my youngest is out of this school, I'll have given everyone with significant contact with my children something handknit. I have twelve more years, so I think this is a completely reasonable goal.

I did knit something else this past week. For the second printmaking class, we were told to bring something in with texture to use while making gelatin prints. So, of course, I figured I'd knit a bit of lace.

That's Roman Stripe from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury, knit in, I think, some Euroflax Linen, and after Saturday it will be completely useless as a piece of knitting, because it will be inky and, I assume, gelatin-y. Quite okay. It seems right that my prints should reflect my fibery interests as well.

But just recently, a pattern finally caught my eye, and the yarn to make it is winging its way here. So I'll probably abandon my stash-busting mitt-making in a day or so and start something new.