Wee Mittens

A cute little pattern found in Vintage Knits for Modern Babies, these were finished in a matter of hours (well, split over 2 days because I didn’t have time to do them all in one sitting).  Knit with Spud and Chloe, Moonlight. (Pattern calls for DK weight but I used worsted.)

The pattern, Wee Mittens, is written to knit these flat and then seam them together.  It’s an interesting construction but I hate seaming so I converted the pattern to knit it in the round. With tis in mind I cast on 30 stitches instead of 31. 

Initially, I knit the length for fingers and thumbs as directed by the pattern.  But I had to go back and take the tops of the fingers and thumbs out and lengthen them because they were far too short for Squishy’s hands (he gets that from his mamma….).

I dislike it when I have a pattern that requires knitting 2 of something and it tells you to knit for “x” inches.  I don’t trust my measuring skills to be so great that I will get the pair the same length (some might also tell me it’s my need to be a perfectionist…).  So instead I labor over counting the rows as I go to make sure they are both the same.  Not hard to do with tiny mittens!

Anyway, I ended up adding 6 more rows to the fingers and 4 more rows to the thumb.  That’s a lot of length when you’re talking about toddler fingers!  Do you see the difference between these two pictures?

Now they fit...well…like a glove!  Squishy loves them and keeps talking about “my new mittens.”  That’s the mark of a job well done.

And to any of you out there who don’t like seaming…don’t be afraid to look at a pattern and decide whether or not it can be knit in the round.  Not everything is as simple as these mittens and would be harder to convert, but this saved me a lot of time, especially considering that if I had knit them flat, I couldn’t have fixed Squishy’s mittens and just would have had to make a whole new pair.