Kindly Sheep Mittens!

A project I finished awhile ago but haven't posted about yet, mostly because I haven't gotten any photos of them yet today, but it is snowing big, fat, fluffy snow today, so walking home through it I decided it was a good day to finally get some pictures of these mittens.

A view from my balcony this afternoon (really only 1/2 the snow shows up in this picture...):

So the mittens.

These are from a great pattern from Knitty (Fall 2009) that was written for a dk weight handspun, but the yarn I fell in love with for them is Fresco by Classic Elite, it's a fingering weight wool, alpaca, angora blend that is so soft!

The pattern is for wrist warmers and a cropped mitten that then hooks onto the wrist warmers and both have the same cable pattern.

I modified them a bit, adding a repeat to the cable motif on both the mittens and the wrist warmers to make them longer because of gauge issues.

I love them so much, the double layering means that your hands stay really warm, although there's still just a single layer at the top so I've been scheming about how to make that better.

Also I'm having some problems with the hooks, especially on the back of the hand staying hooked, I'm contemplating whether to move them further down the cuff (and out of line with the ones on the palm side) or tighten the hooks up with pliers. Leaning towards the pliers at this point because it requires less effort...

I also wish that I had picked a slightly lighter colour for the mitt part because in the dark yarn the cable pattern gets mostly lost, it's there, but the effect is very subtle, whereas on the wrist warmers the cable pattern stands out and is really pretty.

I apologize for the blurry pictures, but the camera refused to focus too well very quickly and the longer I continued trying the same shot the more the pictures became like this:

Something wrong with the camera? I think so!

Anyways, since I finished those not much knitting going on here, been busy with the back to school, new job, messy apartment things.

I've tried a couple socks, one cobbled together from leftovers and the 'More Sensational Socks' book and another that I'm trying to design, but all efforts so far have been failures which kind of makes trying again less appealing.

But I do have a sweater picked out for the Knitting Olympics, so I'm just waiting to get started on that! (should swatch first, maybe I'll go do that!)