I mentioned last time I had to be a bit more mellow than I normally am and embrace a little bit of chaos because of the long color changes on this yarn.  The left and right mitts won’t match exactly, and that’s just ok.

But…that doesn’t mean I’ve totally embraced a go with the flow attitude.  I still want to keep the thumbs as tidy and uniform as I can.  That means doing a very tiny bit of math.

So normally when I knit a mitt, I knit the wrist, then increase for the thumb, then knit up to the middle of the hand. Once the mitt reaches the middle of my palm, I set aside the thumb stitches on a bit of waste yarn and keep knitting up the rest of the hand.  Then I come back and join on a new strand of yarn and knit the thumb.

This works great for most yarn.  But for this one, there would be a big jump in the color if I did that.  The yarn would have kept clicking along, changing color the whole way, as I knit the second part of the hand (about 15-20 rows, each of about 50 stitches).

Instead I figured out how much yarn I’d need for the thumb (by knitting one row of the 15 stitches I’d use in the thumb, ripping that back, measuring how much yarn those 15 stitches took, multiplying that by the 12 rows I want in the thumb, and adding in a bit for the bind off), broke the yarn there, and then joined back on and knit the second part of the hand.

You still have a tiny jump, but it’s a 15 stitches over 12 rows jump, not a 50 stitches over 20 rows jump (~180 stitches of color change instead of ~1000 stitches of color change).  That makes me much happier.

And no, no you generally won’t need to do it for most yarn.  But for long color change yarn like this, it’s a neat trick to have in your back pocket.  And of course the pattern will talk about how to do it in more detail…because we’re knitters…we like the tiny details.  But it’s a handy enough idea I wanted to let everyone know about it!

Pattern for these should be out on the 22nd, and the pattern for the matching hat is already out.

 

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