Making Monday: mitts

Yay! One Project Rainbow mitt, almost completed. I think I'll leave it like that until I've done the other one then do both thumbs at the end. I'm rubbish at thumbs so I'm hoping that doing both at the end will help.

It all went quite quickly once I did a bit of arithmetic and got the chart sorted out in my head. I'm not great at following charts - not cable/lace ones anyway, Fair Isle ones are no bother - and there was a certain amount of head-scratching and thinking it through before it made sense. Having said that, when I got to putting the thumb stitches onto the wool scrap I found I'd ended up a stitch short on the hand somehow..

I've also made the mitts a bit longer than the pattern suggests, partly through misreading the pattern, but actually that's fine because I like a longer cuff and I have biggish hands so the longer the palm part the better really.

The cable and lace panel was, in a way, more straightforward than I was expecting providing I concentrated and didn't panic - 'What? I have to do cables and lace and an increase for the thumb gusset all in the same row?'  It was all a bit like patting my head and rubbing my tummy at one point, while holding three DPNs and a cable needle and shuffling stitch markers of course. The wool (Yarn Yard Clan, 100% merino) is very smooth, almost like cotton, so at times I felt I'd have got on better with a more 'grippy' wool, but I think the smoothness works well with showing off the cable/lace panel. Or will once it's blocked anyway. It looks a bit wonky at the moment.

So now to cast on the second one!