Almost done with number one!

I'm almost at the halfway point with my first mitten. It is taking looooooong. No major mistakes though, and my double knitting skills are definitely improving.



Aside from a simple 3x3 check this mitten is my first... foray into the world of color work. As well as my first attempt at designing color work. ... I swear it looked better on my Excel spreadsheet. o_O
Maybe it'll make more sense once I add the thumb and finish the rest of the body.



Yum. Don't the insides look all soft and warm? Mmmmalabrigo. =)
The brown stitch markers are the ones from EarthChick. They look almost like wooden beads. The pearly one on the left I purchased from Zero's etsy shop a while back.
Right now the brown markers are placed where the thumb should be coming out from and the white signifies the start of the main color work pattern. I decided that the back of the hand would have all the design and the palm would be very simple. I hope I calculated the stitches correctly.



I'm estimating another two days of good, hard knitting to finish this first mitten. And maybe the 2nd will go faster. Sort of like when you're driving to a place you've never been to--it seems like it takes forever to get there, but, when you drive back home it seems like the distance was cut in half. =)

On a completely unrelated topic... I've mastered the art of sounding awake when a phone call takes me out of a deep slumber. ^_^ It spares me the shame of people knowing that I actually wake up a 1pm. ... oops. I always thought the only person I wouldn't be able to trick was my mother, but, this morning she gave me a random wake up call and her first words after hello were, "I'm glad to hear you're already awake."
The only things that give me away are my one word answers, my excessive agreeableness, and the fact that I barely remember the call once I fall back asleep and wake up again. Most of the time I'll have to call the person back when I'm actually awake and have a real conversation with them. I've left a notepad by the bed though to jot things down during these dream-like phone calls. This doesn't always help though... I seem to write down really random words that obviously mean a lot while I'm on the phone but mean nothing to me when I wake up. For example, some of the words on my notepad are: period, kitten, olive garden, embarrassed, violin!!, general. Hmmmm.

Knit hard(er). =)

Mmmmittens

I started on my pair of double knitted mittens. It's my own design so I'm assuming there will be much trial and error. I'm only about half way up the cuff and already I think I might have to frog... the cuff seems a bit too wide.



The outside is Cascade 220 Tweed and the inside is Malabrigo worsted in Glazed Carrot. Yum. I tend to knit tighter on DPNs and ... I'm definitely knitting tighter here.. so tight that my fingers are sore. I feel like I've been knitting forever (I knit through The Waitress, an episode of: The Simpsons, Family Guy, and King of the Hill) and I only have these ~2 inches. o_O Double knitting is insane!



I'm planning a bit of colorwork once I get up to the main body of the mitten... I don't really know what I'd do though. My first idea was to have it look like the thrummed mittens... because those were my original inspiration for these mittens... but, I think I'd like something cooler. I plan to keep most of the outside in tweed and have the orange just be a pop of an accent color. I was thinking either diamonds or crosses with the middles left out. I guess I'll decide when I get to that part.



It's almost December... I really need to put more work towards my Christmas Gifts. o_O... yikes.

I see a lot of sleepless nights in the near future if I don't knit hard.