Snigna!

Not the best finished project photo ever, but Mid took the photo himself to share on facebook.

My last finished object of 2011! I finished them at 745 New Year’s Eve. They took much, much longer than I thought they would take to knit up, otherwise they would have been done in time for Christmas- I would have started them a week earlier.

I wanted to try to knit with unspun roving. I know that once upon a time they sold a yarn called White Buffalo that was essentially a ball of roving that they acted like was some sort of miracle yarn. I had some pencil roving put aside for my faux gradient, but I’m also not picky about what white yarn I use for that.

My thoughts on using pencil roving to knit with:

-gauge was easy. The roving adjusts to the size of the needle almost automatically.

-Obviously, this is a less than durable fiber to knit with. The first mitt is full of places where the roving drifted apart.

-Knitting with it was easier than I expected it to be, regardless of that fact-I was afraid that actually knitting with it would cause the stitches themselves to disintegrate. But that never happened.

-Each mitt has at least one major flaw (one cuff is row too short, and one thumb went on weird) because frankly, I was afraid to try to rip out the roving (I kept hearing strains of that meme, I’m a special snowflake, so delicate and unique…)

I’m not sure why these mitts aren’t knit more often. The colorwork isn’t that bad- and I hate colorwork. In fact, now I want to make stranded mitts for everyone I know. Or at least everyone I can stand talking to for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I will say that there’s a lot of…vagueness to the pattern. For the thumbs, as a starting point, you have to watch the pattern as it knits up- you place markers for the gussets and end up with 9 stitches between the gussets. You place 14 stitches on waste yarn for the thumb. So…where exactly does the other 5 come from? The 5 around the gusset who’s pattern never shifts.

The pattern also comments that the cuff could be knit in two colors. So I did. And thought that striped cuffs on these mitts look dopey (back to that I don’t want to mess with ripping out the roving bit). It then hit me that it meant corrugated ribbing- which creates a more attractive duotoned cuff.

The contrast yarn is Pisces, which I spun up this spring.

(Ravelry project link is here)

(For the record, Snigna is the Slavic god of snow).