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!