The Knitting Fiend

Now that I’ve programmed the circular machine knit mitten pattern generators, and translated that to a hand knit version, I figured it’s time to surf to look at prettier mittens. After all, when I test knit the first mittens, I just punched in a stitch pattern programmed into my Passap E6000 and used that on the top of the mittens. Any stitch pattern is good enough to test knit the shape, and I figure knitters who visit my site probably want to pick their own fancy fair-isle pattern to plaster on the top of their mitten. Otherwise, they’d just get an ordinary pattern at some other site– not run a program, right? (Or am I the only one who likes to modify every single pattern I knit?).

Plus, it’s so easy to punch in other stitch patterns on a knitting machine. Why would I make the same exact mittens twice?

I started my search. Very quickly, I found the most gorgeous mittens at Purlwise. Lily hand knit her mittens using a pattern in Latvian Mittens. Now, that gauge is way to fine for me to hand knit. But, I could program my Passap with a stitch pattern very similar to that one. Stars in the center, little patterns near the wrist. Then, I can whip up mittens to gift people next Christmas. Whoo hooo!

Having found the Latvian mittens I thought I might find more. I’d like to find the hottest, trendiest mittens people want now. I googled for blogs discussing mittens. Unfortunately, Googling isn’t a terrific way to do this; Google favors pages that have been linked. That usually means a bit old and often commercial. Worse, I didn’t find a whole lot of photographs of mittens at blogs. People mention their mittens, but don’t show them! Grrr!

Here’s stuff I found:

Vera at Vera’s Crafty Blog, shows off her first mitten — which looked like a standard mitten. Nice, plush, comfy and warm. And she had a picture!

I could have found more, but searching on “mitten” brings up tons of non-mitten sites….. in German!

Anyway, I figured out I better stop googling for mitten ideas. As cozy as Vera’s mittens look, they aren’t fair-isle. So, they don’t give me design ideas for patterns to incorporate when I test knit my hand knit generator (which I coded, but have not knit. ) So, what am I going to do?

Now, as it happens, I like ridiculous things. I’m thinking: I saw a cute cat fair-isle stitch pattern somewhere. I’ll need to track those down! Has anyone seen dogs? Maybe cats on one mitten and dogs on the other . That could be cute. For kids. (Or, well, me! I may as well admit it. )

Or, has any one who visits seen cute mittens? I’d like to see them! I’ll hunt for those cats and dogs stitch patterns tomorrow.