After mak­ing gifts for months before Christ­mas I final­ly had some time to make the things I want­ed for myself! :D 

I lost my gloves on my first day off for the hol­i­days. It was like the 10th pair I’ve lost. I buy the fleece ones from the dol­lar store and they’re the best — they’re warm and the youth size fits me per­fect­ly. But I guess because they’re so easy to replace, I keep los­ing them! And most of the time I don’t even know how or where! So I thought if I were to knit myself a pair of mit­tens, I’d be more care­ful with them. 

I’ve always want­ed to try the Ancient Stitch Mit­tens by Purl Soho, the stitch pat­tern is just so beau­ti­ful. But the thumb part is knit­ted in the round with DPNs. Not that I haven’t done that before, but I’d much rather knit­ting with 2 nee­dles, and I did­n’t real­ly want to get a new set of short DPNs just for this. So I made up a way to knit them flat.

This isn’t a great pho­to, but you can see that I’ve knit­ted the mit­tens in 3 parts — back, thumb, and palm, then joined them togeth­er. Maybe I’ll write anoth­er post explain­ing how I did that in case oth­ers are inter­est­ed. And yes, I was also vis­it­ing with some old friends dur­ing the hol­i­days :) Mike found his copy of Bun­nic­u­la while going through some old stuff at his parents’. 

I also added cuffs so they’d tuck in bet­ter inside my coat’s sleeve cuffs. I was quite hap­py with the fin­ished mit­tens! But they turned out real­ly huge on me, and I’ve used 6 mm nee­dles instead of the 8 or 9 mm nee­dles that the pat­tern called for. My dad end­ed up tak­ing them because they fit him :D

I was deter­mined to give the pat­tern anoth­er try, this time using a lighter yarn and even small­er nee­dles. I used a skein of hand dyed wool that’s slight­ly heav­ier than the reg­u­lar worsted, and used 5.5 mm nee­dles for the mit­tens and 4.5 mm for the cuffs. And they fit much bet­ter! :D

Here’s a bet­ter pic­ture of them.

Anoth­er project I want­ed to make was the pol­ka dot hat. I used the Lov­ing Hat pat­tern by the Garter Stitch Witch, but knit­ted it flat of course. It is a bit of a has­sle to knit this flat because on the purl side I had to car­ry the white yarn all the way across. Some­times I won­der why I’m so stub­born about knit­ting every­thing flat… but any­way, the fair isle knit­ting made the hat extra thick!

My mom want­ed the same hat, and because this one end­ed up being too big for me, I gave her this hat, and made some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make a small­er hat for myself, with wider spac­ing between pol­ka dots.

For the new year Mike and I decid­ed to make some soup jars for the pantry, since we so often come home from work in the evening with no idea what to make. We used this recipe from She Uncov­ered. 

Added a bay leaf because it’s pret­ty :D

More projects to come, keep­ing hands busy and mind hap­py with more knit­ting and cro­chet! :D Have a good week­end everyone!