Smitten

Lately I've been trying to find ways to put my scraps and odd balls to good use. My first step was to search the Ravelry pattern database. There are lots of good ideas there, but the one that really caught my eye is Smitten: an advent calendar in the form of little mittens strung on a garland.

The pattern is written for worsted weight scraps, so I dug out an odd ball of Bernat Satin in light blue to cast on my first little mitten. About an hour later - an hour which included one YouTube tutorial to learn a knitted cast-on - et voilà, a perfect little mitten.

Next I grabbed some light fingering yarn in a multi-tonal green, rewound it in three little balls and cast on a second little mitten. Yep, that works.

For my third mitten - the orange one - I decided to try it with baby yarn held double. Not a bad result but it's a little smaller than the others. Hence a fourth mitten in red baby yarn held double on needles one size larger. Fingers crossed this matches up better to the first two.

I'd really like to come up with 24 different mittens all from my scraps. I've probably got about six different colours of worsted, so that's not going to take me very far. There are lots more possibilities amongst the sock yarn scraps but I'm less keen about using these up. In my year of projects I've been putting fingering weight scraps to good use in stranded colourwork socks. So maybe instead I can make a dent in the shoebox of various odd balls of baby yarn? There's another half dozen colours there. And even more possibilities if I do stripes or patterns.

Meanwhile I'm thinking about all the little treats and treasures I could fill these mittens with. That's the fun part, isn't it?