Free Pattern: Go Team Mittens

If you’re spending the day in front of the television watching your favorite college football team (or, heck, even at the game) the perfect project for spectating is the Go Team Mittens from Just Crafty Enough.

These basic mittens — sized for an adult woman — can be worked in solids or stripes, according to your needs for representing your team. Example charts for Michigan and Minnesota are provided, as well as a blank chart you can use to draw up your own design, whether it’s for a sports team, a person’s initials or some other design of your choosing.

Now’s as good a time as any to mention its likely you’ll have to draw your own chart if you want to sport a team logo on your mittens or anything else you knit. The names, images and slogans associated with college and professional sports teams are licensed, trademarked and carefully (you might say aggressively) protected by their owners. If you find someone selling — or even giving away — charts with licensed images on them, what they’re doing is illegal. Usually the copyright holder won’t go after someone providing patterns for free or individual crafters who’ve made something for their own purposes, but it has happened.

[Photo by Kathy Lewinski via Just Crafty Enough.]

Just for fun as I was writing this I looked up the licensing guidelines for my school, the University of Arkansas. They helpfully have a guide for crafters (crafting sports stuff is a big deal around here) and you can get a license to sell hand-crafting Razorbacks products for $100 a year, plus $25 for labels to put on your products indicating they are officially licensed. This allows a crafter to sell to individuals but not to wholesale their products, and more hoops must be jumped through for crafters who sell more than 500 items or make more than $2,500 a year selling hog-emblazoned items. I think I’ll stick to red and white stripes (Pantone color 200!) just to be safe.

Jorid Linvik’s Big Book of Knitted Mittens: 45 Distinctive Scandinavian Designs is sure to inspire you to want to knit some fun mittens, whether embellished with classic motifs like birds, hearts, moose and classic colorwork designs or those with a more modern feel liks guitars and skulls, a giraffe, penguins or a turquoise lizard.

The book includes a lot of instructions on how to make your mittens come out right, including a discussion of how different gauges can give you different sizes of mittens (and which mittens can be worked to different sizes for kids and adults). The charts are a little different from others you might have seen in that they show how to divide the stitches on the needles and where to place the thumb.

Looking for more knitting patterns for Mittens? Check these out on Etsy.