"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better."

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.