Utilitarian knitting: mittens and soaker in Lamb’s Pride Bulky
As part of ongoing new baby prep, my parents-in-law came down a couple weekends ago to help me empty out the wool room and get things ready to paint in there. As a result, I had a good opportunity to go through a bunch of stash and I’m working through some old yarns for a couple of utilitarian-type projects. This week or two is Lamb’s Pride Bulky week (or two.)
First up, mittens for my husband! It’s currently Ass Cold in New England; our first bitterly cold snap of the season, really, and I realized this weekend that my poor husband who goes to work at stupid-early in the morning was doing so bare-handed. I’m using Michelle Porter’s Easy Basic Mitten pattern to make him some stripey, bulky orange-and-green hand protection:
Detailed project details are this way. Seth’s hand circumference matches the pattern as written, so the only mods so far are that I’m lengthening it to accommodate his long man-fingers, although I am fudging row counts to get the 4-row stripes to fit in evenly. I have some plans to crunch numbers to make the thumb gusset on mitten #2 fall on the opposite side of the mitten, so the stripe jogs mirror each other. (I’ve been trying to do jogless stripes, but when you’re working with such big stitches it’s really hard to fool the eye completely.)
And…I’m making the kiddo another soaker. I’m knitting the LPB on size 8 needles for this, which is resulting in a totally dense bulletproof fabric I think will work great for stopping leaks. Eve’s fitted-style cloth diapers are Crickett’s in Toddler+, which work great, but with the doubler insert they make her butt huge, and the soakers required to cover such an area are rather epic indeed. At the rate she’s growing I only have a few left that fit over her diapers. The lady at my LYS on Sunday (I was in there because I ran out of black yarn) saw my soaker-in-progress asked me if I was going to felt it. ::snort:: If this thing ever does get felted I think I could use it as building material.
After this soaker is done I’m going to try and make a pair of longies out of a recycled wool sweater. I have the sewing skills of a cavewoman, but honestly, I really need a break from knitting all these damn butt sweaters.
