About this design
“What’s black and white and red all over? – A newspaper of course!”

This design for fingerless mittens was inspired by a simple children’s riddle, soft squishy alpaca fibre and the desire to design something that was warm and stylish and mostly easy to knit. The design has lots of simple garter stitch but is given some pep by including intarsia colour changing, garter stitch grafting, rolled i-cord edges and i-cord bind offs, just to keep things interesting. The cuff of the mittens is knitted flat and then joined with a garter stitch graft. Stitches are then knitted up along the edge of the cuff and the hand part of the mittens is knitted the conventional way from the bottom up and in the round. The upper edges of both the thumb and the hand are finished with an i-cord bind-off.

Many thanks to Lucy Neatby for inspiring me with this technique through her gorgeous Lucky Number Hat 111 pattern.

The Newsworthy Fingerless Mittens are partnered by three other patterns:

• Newsworthy Cowl
• Newsworthy Infinity Scarf (one size fits all)
• Newsworthy Slouchy Beret (small, medium, large)

This is a Magic Ball-Friendly Design. My FREE 18-page Magic Ball Musings information sheet is included with your pattern and includes information on:

Yarn weight
Yarn composition
Yarn colour
Yarn lengths
Yarn joining options
Sourcing your yarns
Creating and using your magic ball

You can substitute a Magic Ball for the main colour in this design.

Tension
22 stitches x 48 rows over 10 cm/4 inches measured on a blocked garter stitch swatch knitted using 3.5 mm (US size 4, UK size 9) needles. Please take the time to check your gauge to ensure that your finished mittens are the correct size. If your gauge is significantly different to the specified gauge, please move up or down a needle size and swatch one more time.

Size
Small
Finished hand circumference equals 20 cm/8 inches. Length from bottom of cuff to top of mitten equals 19 cm/7 ½ inches.

Medium
Finished hand circumference equals 19 cm/8 ½ inches. Length from bottom of cuff to top of mitten equals 21.5 cm/8 ½ inches.

Large
Finished hand circumference equals 22.5 cm/9 inches. Length from bottom of cuff to top of mitten equals 22.5 cm/9 inches.

The design includes some positive ease so please select a size with a finished circumference that is slightly larger than the circumference of the widest part of your hand.

Yarn
The fingerless mittens illustrated in this pattern were knitted with Bendigo Woollen Mills 100% Pure Alpaca double knit/8 ply in the following colours:

Main Colour Natural Cream, Shade 445 (cream)
Contrast A Crimson Heather, Shade 421(red)
Contrast B Storm Heather, Shade 425 (black)

(The two alternate colour ways for the small and large sizes use Blue Grey Heather 442 (grey) as the Main Colour).

However, any suitable weight yarn would be fine for this project.

The Pattern
This pattern includes written instructions, as well as links to video tutorials on most of the techniques used in the design.

Questions?
Please send all questions to capitalKNITS@icloud.com.

ERRATA: CO for cuff should be 26 stitches! Small errors also corrected for medium size thumb and correction for needle size for bind off for hand. Many thanks to Knitbythelake for finding these errors. V1.2 now uploaded with these errors corrected.

NB: I’ve updated the pattern now for one that is much smaller in size - only 1.8 MB. Current version is V1.2.

This pattern was available for FREE from 6 January 2015 to 10 January 2015.