These are Friendship Mittens for my daughter and her friend Anna, who is moving to another school district. The Noro colours flow from one hand to the other, one friend to another. See Gumdrops #2.

Had a fabulous weekend attending Holli Yeoh’s Fine Finishings workshop (Beginnings, Endings, Seaming, Zipper/button bands ) held at Baaad Anna’s Yarn Shop. Learned so many new techniques and tips and why’s and how’s. A glimps into the thought processes of a knitting designer, too! Thank you so much Holli and Anna!

For my 1st Gumdrops, my bright idea is to avoid all those ends and still have multicolour gumdrops. So I picked from my stash a Noro Taiyo (heavy worsted/Aran) as the CC. I always love the long colour changes of Noro.

Well, my idea is not so bright for 2 reasons.

1. The Taiyo is mostly cotton. So it doesn’t have much spring. I ended up with big holes between the gumdrops with those strands of dropped stitches.

2. The Noro colour change is too long, and for the mittens I’m making (preteen size and fingerless), it doesn’t have enough gumdrops to see enough colours.

Solution?

For the holes, I decided to modify to slipped stitches instead. Only at 1st and last rows of the CC. i.e. pattern row 2 and 5 and row 9 and 12. So where one is supposed to later drop the stitches, I slipped it purlwise on those rows. Then when I get to MC row (pattern row 6 and 13), I drop and knit into the MC, making sure I am under all 4 strands of the CC (especially the tighter bottom-most strand where I had slipped that stitch instead). That seemed to close up the holes and still give nice mouthwatering gumdrops. I still knit (and later drop) the stitches for the middle 2 rows of CC as otherwise they become flat.

For the colour change, I considered breaking the yarn and splicing a new colour, but decided against that for now. I just want to see how the Noro (unaltered) will turn out. I guess another yarn with shorter colour changes will work better. Are there self-striping sock yarns in heavy worsted? I could double up a self-stripping DK sock yarn too, but might need to try and match the colour between the strands?

OK, that’s it for my talking aloud. Now to finish the other mitten.

Daughter wanted the fingerless thumb shorter, 3/4”