Process pictures. For thems who like watching the sausage made.
This pattern went through a lot of changes.Initially they started out with a K2, P2 rib stitch. I was basically copying the shape of the Foxgloves I’d knit for a friend of mine, but I changed the lace pattern and added the emblems. I tried to do the color stranding while preserving the ribbing but that was a complete disaster, and knitting a panel of stockinette around the emblem was also terrible looking. (Top left) In the end I had to scrap the whole thing and redesign. I let the three-year-old frog it. He had a great time.
I tried at one point to knit the Hadne Kedar logo in lace. There are no pics. We shall speak of it no more!
I ended up doing a P1, K1 rib stitch which I quite liked. (Top right) I decided to preserve the ribbing as far as I could and just do a small stockinette border around each emblem. I quite liked the new, fine grained ribbing pattern. It looked more industrial to me. More importantly however is that purl rows are almost invisible between the knit rows, and so when it came time to knit the emblems the stockinette border is nearly invisible, it’s not jarring at all.
As it turns out, doing stranded colorwork in the round is tricky when you’re not doing a pattern all the way around the entirety of the work. I tried my best to introduce enough slack into the floats for stretch without leaving big holes, but the straight up and down bits (particularly a problem for the Paragon symbol) ended up kinda bunched up, almost like cables. I was able to flatten them out a bit, lengthening the floats by pulling the ends in and threading them through all the stitches again but holy crap was that hard and annoying and I didn’t have the patience to really fuss as much as I wanted to.
I couldn’t stop fussing with the Paragon symbol. At the last minute I did one more rendition of it in my spreadsheet program. It was worth it though coz I think the final version turned out really great.
Also I knit the Renegade mitt English style and the Paragon mitt Continental and wow, is there a tension difference.
My goal for each project, beyond ending up with a finished item, is always to learn something new. So even though there are plenty of screw ups, I’m pretty happy with these mitts. I did have to adjust the Paragon pattern after I made it, the symbol is a little off relative to the thumb. Hopefully someone else will try the pattern and let me know if the tweak makes it work. ;)
