Crazy Knitter Town, Population One

I have finished and blocked my Kaura hat and we won’t discuss just how pleased I am with it until I post pictures. In the meantime, I’ve apparently moved to Crazy Knitter Town, Population 1.

Originally, when I conceived of this idea of a matched set of hat and mittens, I was going to make the Green Autumn Druid Mittens. Then I started looking at the pattern while my hat was blocking. Two or three columns on a magazine page. Two small charts. No problem. Plus one chart that was an entire magazine page. Yes, an 8 1/2” x 11” chart. I may have started sweating a bit, actually. But I wiped my brow and decided I could handle it. Until I read further and saw it called for 68 stitches around the hand. At the required gauge, I quickly realized that one of two things was necessary: 1) my hands would have to mysteriously grow at least an inch or more in width in a short period of time or 2) I would have to knit on size 0 (2.0mm) needles. Number 1 wasn’t going to happen without some fancy feat of science that would render all my other gloves and mittens useless, and Number 2 required more patience than I thought I would have for this project.

Back to the drawing board. Like I need an excuse to look at more patterns? Pshaw.

I actually drummed up several other plausible mitten patterns that involved cables and that I felt would look nice with the Kaura hat, all the while trying to come up with ones that could be worked suitably small for my hands with minimal modification. Chevalier is gorgeous but too heavy weight. Gallus is beautiful but did not seem quite right to go with Kaura. Magic Mirror was a close contender, but called for 64 stitches in sport weight. Even in the fingering weight I wanted to use, again that would mean I’d be probably working on size 0s, which I didn’t want to do (remember this point later). Regina had cables and bobbles, and I could probably have worked them into mittens, but I thought perhaps that was too much bobbles for one set of outerwear.

So what did I select?

This is the beginnings of Entangled Stitches. Take a look at the pattern if you’ve never seen it. And there you’ll find the answer.

Making moot my entire search and the guidelines I had set, I selected a pattern with the following qualities:

1. Gloves. Yes, Ten fingers. (Grand total of fingers knitted in my lifetime? Zero.)
2. 68 stitches across the hand. (You will note this is peculiarly similar to the pattern I vetoed for just this very reason.)
3. Knitting on size 0 needles. (See above.)
4. A ridiculous amount of tiny cables. (I can do some 1x1 crossing cables without a cable needle, but not ones where you knit the second stitch through the back loop, that just makes life too complicated. Did I mention I don’t have a size 0 cable needle, so I have to use a double-pointed needle?)
5. 14 charts. (Do I even need to explain this one?!)

And this is why today, I am the mayor and sole citizen of Crazy Knitter Town. Care to join me?