Pattern: Little Thrummed Mittens by Nikki Van De Car from her book What to Knit When You’re Expecting
Yarn: Quince & Co. Osprey in Kumlien’s gull
Size: as written
Yardage: maybe 30 m of yarn plus the thrums
Needles: 4.0 mm
Ravelry Link here.

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I went into my sewing room to do a bit of sewing the other day. As usual “doing a bit of sewing” involved doing a bit of cleaning up first. Not the kind of cleaning up where you really put anything in its proper place, because so many of the things in my sewing room are there because they have no proper place, but more the kind of cleaning up where you move piles of things around until you can reach whatever it was you were looking for when you started. Many of the homeless things in piles in my sewing room are projects in various states of competition, from planning to almost done. There are zip top bags with zippers and fabric and yarn and, if I’m lucky, some notes or a pattern about what it was I was planning to do with the other contents. The bags do not stay in their piles very well and have to be re-piled pretty regularly. This is not so bad though because it means that sometimes I see a bag and decide to finish up the project instead before I get to whatever it was I went into the sewing room to do in the first place.

When I went into the sewing room the other day one of the bags full of unfinished project I found contained these little thrummed mittens, a length of ribbon and a spool of thread. The ribbon isn’t a perfect match, colour-wise, for the thrums and I have to assume that was my reason for not sewing it on three years ago when I put the things in the bag. It’s really not so bad a match though, they are both shades of white and these mittens were supposed to be a really quick project. They are thrummed baby mittens after all. There’s not even a thumb to worry about.

As far as I can remember I finished knitting these the December before Maisie was born. That means they’ve actually been sitting around for over four years but I’m reasonably confident I didn’t come across the piece of ribbon until a while later. I’m also reasonably confident that part of why they didn’t get finished up a long time ago is because once I’d finished knitting them, which went very quickly, I couldn’t figure out how you’d get a tiny, floppy baby hand inside with all the thrums. So Maisie wasn’t going to be wearing them and I wasn’t going to give them away to any of the other babies that we knew. They weren’t worth ripping out because there was so little yarn in there. Also, they were pretty cute looking. If you ever did get them on a baby they would look like boxing gloves. They are even funnier inside out when they become strange muppet things with crazy hair sticking out in every direction.

What to do with a project that can’t be used, is too cute to just throw away and isn’t worth ripping out to salvage yarn? I’ve decide they can be a talisman against the cold. They’ve been sewn to their ribbon and are now hanging on the wall along side some other pieces of artwork near our front door. At the very least they should provide us with some entertainment when the cat notices them and tries to jump five feet up the wall to reach them.

*In keeping with the general theme of tardiness with this project. These mittens were finished, these photographs taken, and this blog post written on 31 January 2017. I have no idea why I didn’t post them. There must have been some reason. I’ve been meaning to write something for the last couple of weeks but haven’t had the energy and didn’t even know this was sitting here just waiting for me to hit a button.