Friday, August 17, 2012

Project #8 - Pair of Mittens - Knit in the Round!



While I had my ribber set up on my bulky and some left over yarn sitting about, I decided to knit a pair of mittens that would require a minimum of sewing after the fact.

I knit the ribbing as usual, which unfortunately cannot be done in the round, and set forth to see how I would make out.  Once the ribbing was done, and ending with my carriage on the right, I transferred all the needles right of 0 to the ribber and all the ribber needles on the left of 0 to the main bed.
Changed to knit arm - dropped the ribber bed slightly to knit the needles on the main bed onto waste yarn.  I removed the waste yarn stitches, turned the work and rehung the stitches over the opposite needles from the needlebed.  So now I had the same number of stitches on both beds directly opposite each other.

Weights are very important here so get lots of weight on both section (front and back)

Changed to ribber arm - Knit 14 rows which means 28 passes of the carriage.

Changed to knit arm -drop the ribber bed to work on knit bed only.
Put all but the 7 sts on the right to hold and set the carriage to hold as well.
pull out 7 more needles on the right and e-wrap them - hang a weight.
Thread up carriage and knit 14 rows
Transfer EOS to reduce down to 7 - knit across - remove sts on yarn tail with a tapestry needle.

Put all empty needles back to A position - then pull 7 back out to work position (B) immediately to the right of the needles in hold.
Pull the thumb piece up, fold it down then fold it to the left to create the thumb.  Hang the 7 loops on the top edge facing you on the seven empty needles.

Change to rib arm and push ribber back up with thumb in between the beds inside the mitten.
Thread up your carriage, make sure there is lots of weight as before and now make 56 passes

Finally, we just have to decrease for the finger tip section,  I decided I would decrease one stitch each side of the main bed and ribber and knit 4 rows until it got to I think it was 9 on each bed.  I took these off on waste yarn to graft later.

I repeated the same for the other mitten but made sure the thumb was on the left side so there is one more row after the 28 before you reach the thumb.  Otherwise everything else is the same.

Graft the fingertip, sew the short thumb seam and finally sew up the side seam on the ribbing.  Done.

I know it seams like a lot of changing of the ribber and knitting arms BUT I think the final result looks great and well worth the effort.  I would definitely make more this way for sure.

3 comments:

  1. They look great! I really wish I had been able to get a ribber when I got my 155. Especially since I'm making mittens for a boutique now. I hate latching up ribbing. If you ever think of selling your machine....

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  2. Thank you for sharing your work and the details of how you arrived at the finished project. I just finished one of these mitts and it was my first ever project using a ribber--well, actually, I made a fingerless mitt, since we don’t live as far north as you do. :) Thank you for your blog and for keeping it going for us intrepid new knitters!

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  3. So happy to see you have finished your mitten using my instructions. Way to go!!
    I keep plugging away at the blog and try to keep it current. Thanks for dropping in!

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