thrummed mittens – Cowtown Knits

Oslo

May 11, 2018Leave a comment

The next pattern in Travel Knits for the Family is named after the beautiful city of Oslo, Norway.

The pattern is for some very versatile mittens. They feature the same cable and rib pattern as the Bergen hat, but in mitten form. And for those who are more adventurous and need some extra warmth, the pattern has optional thrums worked into the centre of the cables. If this is your first time working thrums, there is a handy photo tutorial at the back of the book to walk you through it.

The magic of the pattern is that it comes with lots of variations. Make them fingerless, full mittens, or flip-top. And you also have the choice to make them with thrums or not. For my family we ended up with two pairs of thrummed mittens – one flip-top and one full mitten – and two pairs without thrums – one fingerless and one full mitten.

We visited Oslo in the Fall of 2017. We spent a day and a half in the city, exploring the abundant museums, the opera house, and the harbour area. The highlight of the trip though was the train ride from Oslo to Bergen. It’s actually billed as one of the top train journeys in the world, with good reason. It leaves from Oslo and winds its way through forests, lakes, and fields up to snow-capped mountains and rushing streams, and then back down through beautiful fjords on the way to Bergen. I tried to take lots of photos through the train windows, but in the end I decided to just enjoy the view.

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For more information about Travel Knits for the Family, get all the details here.

More Thrums

October 28, 2012Leave a comment

I have been one busy lady lately. All work and no play makes me fairly happy actually, but I must confess that the meals I’m putting on the table have been a little lacking. Tonight I boiled some pasta and threw in a jar of sauce. Everyone knew better than to complain too much.
But, I am getting a lot of stuff done. A little over a week ago I managed to finish another pair of thrummed mittens for my friend’s other little boy. The boys are very close in age and their hands aren’t that different in size so instead of adding another repeat to the pattern I just went up to a size 6 needle (rather than the size 5 I used for the smaller ones). This gave me an extra 1/2″ in width and height, which was just about what I needed. I chose another random stripe pattern but with the same colours, so the mittens would be similar but different enough that they would know whose were whose. I delivered them last week, but apparently the boys are not big fans of the feel of the thrums on the inside so we are considering lining them.
Last week I worked and worked and worked on my kids’ cowboy costumes. I am pleased to report that the damn shirts are finally done. I am not going to rant now about how painful the process was, I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, the mitts…

Thrumming Along

October 18, 20121 Comment

I was recently commissioned by a friend to knit some thrummed mittens for her and her two boys. They are wonderfully warm mittens, perfect for these frigid Cow Town winters. I still had lots of bright colours of Cascade 220 and some taupe-coloured Merino roving left in my stash so I was able to start on them right away. I decided to do them in a random stripe pattern of four colours. Since I’m terrible at being random or overly creative when it comes to these things, I hit up the handy-dandy Random Stripe Generator, input the colours and rows I wanted, and refreshed away until I found a pattern I liked. Also, since I have a terrible memory, I looked up the Yarn Harlot’s thrum tutorial. Then I did a swatch to figure out how many stitches and rows per inch (aka stitch gauge and row gauge) I had for my yarn and needle choice and did a little math to determine how many stitches I needed. I made a chart in Excel and added my stripes, thrums, thumbs and decreases and badda-bing, badda-boom, I had myself a pattern. I’ll include the chart here for anyone who might be curious, but with the warning that you have to do some reading between the lines (or just go ahead and ask me questions) if you’re going to try and make a mitten from it. I’m also going to show a little detail on how to make thrums.

Lets start with the chart…

And now a brief tutorial on how to make a thrum. The usual advice is to make up a bunch so that you can just reach for them when you need them, and that is certainly most efficient, but I am neither usual nor efficient. I usually make enough for a row when I get to a thrum row, it breaks up the monotony.