A bit of a knitting frenzy

 So last week or so, I finally finished a pair of lined wool mittens for myself that I started back in 2019.  What pushed me to finish was taking a walk while wearing gloves and my fingers got cold.  And I thought to myself, finish those darn mittens, they will be great for walking.  I always planned for them to be my snowshoe mittens, but fortunately for my procrastination on finishing them, we have not had a lot of snow the last few years.

So here are the finished mittens:  

The pattern is called Northman Mittens by David Schulz.  The pattern is available on Ravelry which is where I originally saw it when one of the weavers on Warped Weavers posted her finished mittens.  When they were done, I took them for a walk with my mom.  She eyed them and I asked if she would like a pair and she said yes.  When I came home from the walk I went through one of the tubs of wool and found a couple of skeins of knitting wool that will work well.  

Mom is not crazy about wool next to her skin, so I ordered some Rowan Cotton Glacé for the lining.  I picked up all the stitches and started knitting with the cotton and decided I just did not like the way was knitting or feeling.  I then went and ordered a couple of skeins of Galileo Merino/viscose from KnitPicks.  I think that the blend should be okay, plus its not like she will be wearing them for hours on end.

These are mom's mittens, the green is a needle cozy holding the DPN's that have the cuff stitches picked up on.  

Since I was waiting for the KnitPicks yarn to come and I was in knitting mode, I pulled out the leftover yarn from the outside of both pairs of mittens and knit a scrappy hat.  That went really fast, so I knit another, and another from some other bits of yarn.  They all had to be washed and blocked, and since I was doing that, I finished weaving in the ends of a vest and washed and blocked that as well.

So here is the results off a weeks long frenzy with knitting needles:  the vest finished, 3 hats knit, and the outside of mom's mittens.  The vest and hats are for WoolAid, I just need to package it all up and send it in.  There is also another vest on needles, so once that is finished I will send it all off.

I wove some holiday towels again this year, and also made some holiday temari.  This morning I finished stitching the 3rd temari, so it is nice to have that all finished up.  Temari are so fun to do so I am glad that I have another blank all ready for stitching.  I just have to decide on the pattern and colors.

There was a thread about sizing a warp out on Warped Weavers on Ravelry that really had me thinking.  For quite a while, I had been messing around with some fine hemp yarn and Romney singles that I had spun.  I finally decided on a draft and the number of ends and so forth, and wound the warp.  I sized it using Sta-Flo liquid laundry starch and dressed the loom.

When I started to weave, I was having broken ends all of the place.  It seemed that with every pass of the shuttle an end broke.  I was not going to deal with something like that, so I just cut it all off and tossed and chalked it up to a bad experience.  Now after reading the sizing thread, I realized I over starched the warp making it very stiff and brittle.  No wonder I was having the issues that I did.  This was a wonderful thing to figure out because I really wanted to use this yarn in this project.  I am planning on refiguring the weaving draft and wind a new warp and give it another shot.  Time will tell!