Northman Mitten KAL: Many Beautiful Mittens

I am proudly pronouncing  this KAL a total success. There are new mittens everywhere. Many participants are now smitten with stranded knitting and planning more mittens or slippers or sweaters. New techniques have been learned from cast on in two colors to charting your own motifs. This has been so much fun.

Thanks to everyone who has participated. I know that there are more people knitting these mittens with us than we have seen post in the Ravelry group. Some of you are local Knit ‘n Needle Yarn Shoppe customers and others of you are just quiet and not that into posting online. We totally get that.

I also know that there are some of us that aren’t finished with our Northman Mittens. I am one of the unfinished people. My hands really began to bother me and the stranded knitting was not helping. But my hands are feeling much better and I am going to get these mittens done before the end of winter. So if you are feeling like a KAL dropout, just keep knitting.

The projects shown below are completed mittens that have been shared in the Northman Mitten KAL thread of our Ravelry group. The knitters’ names are their Ravelry IDs. Mittens are linked to their project pages for details if they have one.

• Top left: augustgirl62’s My Mittens
• Top right: BarbHee’s Northman Mittens
• Bottom right: sk1dder’s Northman Mittens
• Bottom left: fqfantic’s First Mittens

• Top left: getknitty’s Northman Mitten KAL
• Top right: mrsmommy’s Northman Mittens
• Bottom right: danac99’s Bobcat Northmans
• Bottom left: Ticklishgypsy’s Northman by way of Kalispell KAL

• Top left: getknitty’s DH’s Northman Mittens
• Top right: knitski’s Northman Mittens
• Bottom right: twincomet’s Northman Mittens
• Bottom left: telogirl’s DH Birthday Mittens

• Top left: knitalongtime’s Northman Mittens KAL
• Bottom left: telogirl2003’s Northman Mittens

There have been some very fun modifications to some of the Northman Mittens.

Below you can see, knitalongtime replaced the diamond with cross inside on the back of the hand with  little crouching telemark skier. She charted the skier out and worked her favorite winter sport into her Northman Mittens.

I already highlighted in a previous post how Mrsmommy knitting the year “2013”  into her mittens’ thumbs.

Finally, Schmoopy totally modified her Northman Mittens into fingerless mittens. She is a huge fingerless mitt fan so this modification isn’t surprising.

A good number of the projects shown in this post are the first stranded knitting projects of the knitters. You would never guess this by looking out the project pictures, would you?

So we conclude our very first official Polkadotsheep KAL. Many have asked if we are doing any more KALs and the answer is YES. There will not be a KAL going at all times. But we are actively planning the next KAL and planning other fun “alongs” that you can join in with us. So keep your eyes on the blog, our Facebook page and participate discussions in the Ravelry group.

Thanks for hanging out with us knitting your Northman Mittens and all your other projects! Happy Knitting!

~Angela M.

All Sorts of Fun

Just a chatty sort of post for you today!

First up, this is the official last day of our Northman Mitten KAL. Please share a picture of your finished (or half-finished in my case) mittens in our Ravelry group’s Northman Mitten KAL thread. I would love to feature them in the KAL wrap up post.

Second, if you are a Facebook fan of ours, you already know that often we share when orders come in, new yarns, sale reminders and lovely photos of yarn and Montana. You can join us on Facebook by clicking that nifty button to your right that says “Like” and you will have joined our Facebook flock of fans.

New Madelinetosh DK colorways: Early Grey (L), Worn Denim (R)

So as we said this week on Facebook, a new big shipment of Madelinetosh yarns came in this week. New colors of both Tosh DK and Sock and new stock of favorite colors are available. We are still working of photos of the new colors so do check back later too.

Madelinetosh Tosh Sock restocked in Robin’s Egg (L) and new Seawash (R)

This would be a good time to share a project that I made this summer, a short-sleeved baby sweater for my newest niece. I used Tosh Sock in the Mansfield Garden colorway. I didn’t want to share it on the blog because I had bought the last skein of that color to knit the sweater. But now, Mansfield Garden is back in stock, so here is the sweater. It is a Baby Sweater on Two Needles published in the Knitter’s Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmerman. The only modification I made was leaving off the sleeves and finishing the edges with garter stitch border to match all the other borders.

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On to our newest yarns here at Polkadotsheep…

Bamboo Bloom in Fallen Petal (L), Precious Jade (C), Koi Pond (R)

Bamboo Bloom Hand Paints is rather unusual thick and thin yarn. The thin shiny sections are rayon made from bamboo and the thick sections are fluffy wool. All this combines to a very different texture and look when knit up. Our in store customers have been snapping it up. A member of our Ravelry group says she has already made up two cowls with it and loves them. She used the free Penelope Handpaints Cowl pattern from Universal Yarns designed specifically for Bamboo Bloom. Get yourself a copy of the pattern  and your favorite skein for some fun knitting.

Rhichard Devrieze’s Peppino in Seaside Surf (L), Carnival (C), Temptation (R)

This lovely variegated yarn is Peppino from Rhichard Devrieze. It is a 2 ply superwash 100% sockweight yarn. There is really no lack of ideas for sock weight yarn these days with the popularity of shawls and socks. But as a little FYI, Peppino is a bit different from our other currently stocked hand dyed sock  yarns in that it comes in 65 g / 225 yd skeins rather than 100 g skeins. That means you will need two skeins to knit an average sized pair of socks. So make sure you have the right yardage for your project idea.

Finally, two links to useful blog posts I found this week:

• Knitting on Paper at Laylock – graph paper for charting colorwork with knit stitches instead of squares. Genius!
• Yarn Weight vs. Bead Size at Laura Nelkin’s blog – a chart for pairing the correct bead size with your yarn choice.

That is all for now. Be sure to stop by early next week to see beautiful finished Northman Mittens. There will also be information coming about our next “Along” event later in the week.

Have a lovely weekend and happy knitting!

~Angela M.