Knitting really big mittens

Every year around this time it gets really cold in Japan. Well, not really cold. I'm sure most of you are in colder places, but you probably have central heating. It has only been dancing around freezing at night here, but we have no double paned windows, no notable insulation and our heat source is our electric air conditioner on the wall that doubles as a heater.

So far, I've been fine this winter, but I spend most of my days at the University and when I'm at home I spend all my time under our kotatsu (heated table). Russell, on the other hand, works at his desk, which excludes the kotatsu option. Once the cold hit, his hands and feet got really cold, and that makes work unpleasant and both typing and guitar playing a real challenge. For Christmas, I bought him some velcro wrist cuffs with heat pad inserts, but those haven't seemed to catch on. I managed to catch the Eddie Bauer end of year sales and stocked up on long underwear, but even X-large size gloves aren't big enough.

I've been happily knitting hats since the weather cooled down, and I had a bad feeling I knew what Russell was hoping for. I looked everywhere, but couldn't find gloves in his size. Finally, I offered to try knitting him some gloves. He was excited by the idea of custom gloves, but I wasn't sure it was going to happen. I know how to knit, purl and decrease. That's it. I can make nice hats with that information, but the glove patterns were far more complicated.

I hunted around online. Russell suggested I make mittens instead of gloves. That seemed more doable, so I started hunting in that direction. I finally found a post with a self-described "simple mitten" pattern. What caught my attention were the detailed instructions for customizing he patter to different hand sizes and instructions for knitting in a warmer lining. This all sounded really good. Even better, was the practice tiny mitten that could be made quickly to practice all the stitches.

I went out and got smaller knitting needles yesterday and spent the evening working my way through the tiny mitten pattern. I had to fall back on YouTube tutorials to figure out how to do a few of the directions, but nothing was too hard once I knew what to do. I learned how to increase, how to slip stitches and use slip stitches for an different kind of decrease, I learned how to pick up stitches and how to make an afterthought thumb. I am not too modest to crow a bit about the results. I'm quite proud of myself.

Today I plan to try making a left side mitten and practice knitting in a liner. It sounds easy enough but it adds one more thing to think about. Ugh.

Once I get the hang of the liner (or give up on it all together) I will figure out how to adapt the mitten pattern for Russell's giant paw. You can see from the picture that I have a ways to go.