Personalizing the Knitting

 

One of the greatest things about being a knitter, apart from the taking of raw materials and making something useful/beautiful/creative, is that it allows you to show a little of your personality in what you do. 

If you love that sweater you saw but truly find that pale pink is not your color, you can knit it yourself in neon green, or purple, or red, and make it your own.

Take a simple pattern and add embellishments and you create something new and uniquely yours. So let's take a simple pattern for fingerless mitts and dress them up a little.  Let's experiment with yarn and needles!

Like many knitters, I have a small (ok, not that small) collection of odds and ends of yarn that seem too much to just throw away, but too little to do much with.  I have partial balls of yarn used to make sweaters, blankets, lace shawls, half used up crochet cotton from knitting doilies, ends of sock yarn.....all waiting to be turned into something different, or used as "waste yarn" to hold stitches.  Most of it is without labels or even a vague recollection of what I used the yarn for originally.  Let's grab a couple of things out of my collection and see where it takes me.

Large Knitted Flowers for Mitts with a Twist - a starting off point.

Step One -  Find some yarn you like to go with your mitts.  In this case I picked out a striped,  loosely twisted wool.

Step Two - decide on needles.  I knit the mitts on US 8 needles, so I used those.

Step Three - start knitting!

Using a cable cast on (the cast on edge is going to show and I like the almost slipped stitch look the cabled cast on gives) cast on 40 stitches making sure you leave yourself a generous tail (about 9 inches) for sewing up later.

Rows 1-5 Knit Across all Stitches.

Row 6 - K2tog across (20 stitches)

Rows 7 and 9  Knit Across all Stitches

Row 8 - K2tog across (10 stitches)

Row 10 - K2tog across (5 stitches)

Cut yarn leaving a 9 inch tail and thread onto a darning needle.  Slip all 5 stitches onto that yarn and pull tight.  It will look like this :



Starting the opposite end to where your cast on tail is sitting, roll the piece around your thumb, forming a flower like shape.  You can play with it a bit to get the flower looking the way you want.  Once you are happy with the shape of your flower, tack petals into place using your cast on and cast off tails , drawing both through the bottom of the flower and leave hanging like this :


Grab your mitt and decide where you want your flower.  Using those tails sew the flower to the mitt, I take them through on either side of a twisted knit stitch and tie them with a knot on the inside of the mitt, then weave the ends up or down the same stitch line.

For smaller flowers you could use fingering weight yarn, or even crochet cotton!

Really Small Flower -

Cast on 20 stitches using Pearle Cotton (size 8 on US 1 needles in this case.)

Knit 3 rows
K2tog across (10 Stitches)
K2tog across (5 stitches)

Complete as with Large Flower.

Two of the pink ones are following the Large Flower Pattern, worked on US 0 needles all the purple and the smaller pink one  follow the Really Small Flower Pattern., also on a US 0 needle.

The small ones look really good in groups of three or more. (In my opinion!)

You don't have to limit yourself to putting these on mitts - they also work on hats, headbands, as gift tag adornments and according to at least one teenager in my life, on jewelry.