Materials: 4 skeins Knit Picks Telemark (100% Peruvian Highland Wool), 2 in Drift and 2 in Deep Navy. Size 0 and size 1 needles. Pattern: a fusion of Norwegian Totoro Mittens and Anemoi Mittens.

Time: Coupla weeks.

Cost: $8.

My Neighbor Totoro is a great movie.  For children, but not pandering; deliberate, but not slow; fanciful, but not self-consciously whimsical.  Of course, I realized all this after the DVD went out of print.  To pass the time until it’s re-released in March, I made these mittens.

These mittens are based on one pattern and drafted from another, and all inspired by a project that I saw on Ravelry.

These mittens were knit with a relatively large yarn on a relatively small needle, so they’re nice and thick (you can see that they stand up, albeit floppily, for themselves). They’re designed to be outer mittens for a thin pair of liner gloves, so I can still manipulate camera controls or fumble around for my bus pass in frigid weather without having to completely remove all hand coverings.

I ended up taking out a row or two on each edge of the mitten to shrink the finished size a bit. There are also some imperfections here – some disappearing stitches and wonky patterns, and I actually meant for the colors to be reversed – but I’ll refer to those as “character.”

Also, because the past few months have notably lacked much cold or snow, they work perfectly well on their own.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 10:45 am and is filed under diy, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.