Few things are as inspiring as teaching, in my opinion. To begin, planning workshops and exercises gives me lots of ideas - but even more questions from participants, not to mention seeing how they use instructions as starting points for their own ideas. During my latest twined weekend at HV I cast on to make a pair of mittens to put some pattern and shape ideas into practice.
Almost as inspiring but far more time-consuming is not being satisfied with the results... Actually, I don't mind it very much as long as I can think of ways to make improvements. It gives me material for a blog post too!
First, the shape wasn't quite right: the cuff was too long (not to wear, but to me it looks out of proportion) and more importantly, the mitten was slightly too narrow to be comfortable:
This shorter cuff looks a lot better and the width is comfortable - but the placement of the pattern is out of balance. It looks as if it has sunk and hit wrist bottom:
To look on the bright side, ripping back a number of rows (again) gave me a few meters of pre-twisted yarn to work with:
I thought of adding a horizontal line to frame the pattern shapes, but decided it would look odd, so I added five small pattern shapes instead:
The mitten doesn't really match what I had in mind, but then my finished projects seldom (never?) do. Here is where I would stop if I was less pleased with it (and use it for workshops) but I'm happy enough with it to knit a second one.
