domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

Two nights ago, Maura very mournfully informed me that she couldn’t keep her hands warm at recess. Why, you ask? Obviously because I hadn’t knitted her any mittens. It definitely has nothing at all to do with the fact that she’s already lost one of the gloves from the pair I bought her last week.

Still, when she looks all sad and asks me to make her things, I almost always oblige, so this evening I sat down to make some simple mittens. As you can see above, Basil decided to help me. Funnily enough, the cats–all eight of them–are almost totally uninterested in my knitting. Basil, though, wants to lay on the yarn, and wants to just put the yarn in his mouth, and wants to put his paws over the yarn that I’m pulling out of the skein… He’s more like a cat than the cats are!

An hour or so after that picture, I had a mitten. Okay, more than an hour or so, because I was making a fair isle snowflake, then realized halfway through that the variegated yarn had a section almost identical to the oatmeal yarn I was using, and the snowflake looked horrible. So I ripped it all out and started over. But had I not done that, it would’ve been an hour or so.

I finished the second one last night, and today she wore them to school. She’s reported back that they kept her quite warm, and I’m pleased that they seem to fit reasonably well. (Reasonably well is about all I can ever expect with her, even when I’m making it myself. She can’t hold still, so I end up sneaking into her room while she’s sleeping to slip mittens and hats and socks on, trying to see if they’ll fit.)

I tend to knit almost exclusively with DK weight and lighter, and I have to say that I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying worsted weight lately. There’s something to be said for finishing a project in a single evening. Next up, I think I’m going to whip out a few pairs of fingerless gloves as Christmas presents. This is definitely the year of the handmade Christmas around here–sort of enjoyable in its own right.