Vanfox at institches posed the following question while we were chatting in email.
When making mittens, rather than holding stitches for the thumb, is there any reason you couldn't do the thumb first and then pick up the stitches and finish the mitt?
Would there be any advantages to this? A more stable thumb? Is vanfox23 the next Elizabeth Zimmerman?
4 comments:
It would certainly eliminate the thumbless mitten problem I have. It's my own version of the Second Sock Syndrome.
I've never made a mitten so I don't know how they are even constructed. I just threw the idea out there. Maybe I'll start a set to try the thumb first and see where I get...
I suppose you could do the thumb and finger parts seperately, then join and decrease as needed. If you wanted the stitches pointed in a different direction for the pattern, or if you didn't know how far your yarn was going to go, so you were knitting both mittens at once from the top down so you could add contrasting yarn to lengthen the cuffs when you ran out. Or if you wanted to knit mittens with easily re-knitable cuffs. Yeah - it's do-able.
Whilst considering this problem, I was reminded about the "Target Wave Mittens" from Knitting Nature. If you knit the thumb first, then flowed into the hand portion, it would look kinda like that pattern. The problem would be when coming off of the thumb, all of your stitches are going out in different directions, and making the tube open from your thumb and extending both up and down the mitten. I don't see why it couldn't be done, but I think it would take some EZ style engineering. (of course, then I went to look it up to see if someone had already done this, and EZ did! The sideways mystery mittens from knitting around are one piece, starting with a line along the inside of thumb and first finger, going down with raglan-like increases)
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