A good friend of mine painted some yarn last year. Upon the painting of said yarn, I thought it was really beautiful and wanted to knit it up….so, I did the only thing any reasonable knitter would. I offerred to knit something for the painter with her yarn. Before you think that I’m generous of nature (yes, I know you’re really thinking I’m a tad tacky), I must admit that I was really lusting after the yarn. I had already named it. It is green and blue, so it made me think of the Lochness Monster in water. I called it the Lochness yarn for about 6 months before making my offer and getting her to bring me the pretty yarn. She joked quite a bit about when her gift would be done and I put her off all the while plotting the perfect mitts for the yarn her.

I looked through a lot of patterns. I wanted something with cables because she likes them almost as much as I do, but not too complicated so the yarn would be shown off. I cast on the Hermoine Mitts as practice, but that wasn’t moving me, so I frogged. I started to take a look at the Monkey Fingerless Mitts since I know the monkey socks look great in just about any yarn, but too many red flags made me continue my hunt:
red flag 1: the monkey socks are viral (15,000+ projects). These mitts have less than 50 projects.
red flag 2: there were two versions of the pattern that I might download. what does this mean? it’s a complete double rainbow?
red flag 3: the comments………did not bode well.

That’s when I sorted the patterns by popularity and settled on Mitt Envy. Surely, the kinks have been worked out after 1100+ projects. As is often the case with me, the third time’s the charm!

I surprised her with the first mitt on her birthday to make sure it fit and brought her the pair about a week later. I daresay she was pleasantly surprised by my turn around on the second mitt considering it took so long for the first one. It is nice to have a friend that appreciates the hand knits….and is willing to let me play with her one-of-a-kind hand-painted yarn! She’s a good egg!

Ps. Happy Leap Day, World!
Think of all the things you can get done this year now that you have a whole extra day!

This has nothing to do with knitting and I’m somewhat of a hippie, so if you are more of a GOP type folk, you might want to skip down to the **

I don’t have a ton of time to blog because I’m busy sending anti-Keystone Pipeline emails. It isn’t going to create very many jobs and the oil will not be sold domestically after traveling through the heartland of America. I am not a fan.

**On a more positive note, Hunter’s pattern is available! (and I’ve no idea what her political thoughts are – she has not approved being in the same blog post as the above, so please just ignore my political rantings and go buy her pattern and knit socks until the world is full of bunnies and flowers and peace).

Happy Thursday! :-)

Hunter called for test knitters and I was fortunate enough to try this pattern for her. I am thrilled with the first sock and the second one has been singing along. I’d actually been looking forward to knitting these socks since Hunter blogged about them. She was writing about rain and they looked like rain to me, but was knitting them in an orangey red and I kept hearing the Adele song “Set Fire to the Rain” on the radio, so I called the socks this in my head and hoped that soon I’d be able to knit them up……in blue….per my usual m.o. One of the coolest things was that it really rained here just as I was finishing the first sock, so I guess knitting these is some kind of rain dance! Look!!! Green clover!

I really enjoyed the pattern. This was my first time to try Handmaiden Casbah (color: salt spray) and it is beautiful. For some reason, I have a bad feeling about how well it will hold up, but time will tell and I’ll report back. I do recommend magic loop rather than dpns for this pattern due to the charts. Totally worked out for me since I was magic looping due to a plane knitting strategy and then decided that was smart way to go about these socks.

The pattern should be out soon if you are a fan.
Ps. Happy Valentine’s Day!