After my first pair of mittens turned out to fit my husband better, I jealously started a new pair. I became overly ambitious and used ChartMinder.com to mash up some Fair Isle patterns I’d seen floating around on Pinterest, basically a zig-zag pattern, some spaced out “snowflakes”, a tree-like shape, and more “snowflakes” based on 16 stitches since my CO total was 32. I thought this would work okay since the pattern would be distributed evenly on the front and back; I forgot about the thumb part though so I skipped the pattern on the gusset and thumb.
In an effort to improve my colorwork tension, I changed the way I held the yarn and spaced out the stitches which actually made it worse. I ended up frogging back to the cuff four times because I wasn’t happy with how it was turning out.
I suppose the key (and this seems to apply to life in general) is to relax. Because the fifth time I restarted the colorwork, it turned out much much better. While I’m pretty excited to have made up my own little chart, I think I’d like to follow an existing pattern just so I can understand how to carry over the pattern to the thumb part.
I had to redo the thumb part (too many stitches), and I attached the mitten top so that the joined end was on the palm side (which meant trying to understand the mitten top shaping to work with my changes). I meant to add some colorwork on the mitten top as well, but I was in a bit of a rush to finish them up. I added an I-Cord loop to the mitten top and a button to keep it from flopping around.
Huge takeaway though: acrylic yarn is cheap and great for mitten practice, but it’s not suitable for 20 degree weather with wind; I wore it out at night in such weather and was pretty cold. Still happy with how it turned out. Now I need to save up money for wool yarn!