Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Free Pattern: Go Team Mittens

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team mittens just crafty enoughIf 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. 

Comments

  2. I am unable to get to the actual pattern for the Men’s Version of these great mittens. Can any one please help!

Have you read?

Knit Yourself Some Pockets

It’s a common complaint among women and femme dressing folk that our clothes do not include enough (and enough useful) pockets. And even if your clothes do have good pockets, there’s always a chance that you’d rather have another pocket to put some essentials in rather than having to carry a whole bag. 

But because we are knitters, we can take this problem into our own needles and knit ourselves some auxiliary pockets. 

Beatrice Mase did just that, with a kind of fancy toolbelt pocket accessory that they call VELVET Pockets. 

The stitch pattern has a plush, sort of velvet effect, thus the name, but it’s worked with regular fingering/sock weight yarn. (The sample uses wool, but you could experiment with other fibers, too.) It calls for 776 yards of 710 meters, which you might just have in your sock yarn stash. 

The pattern includes several pockets of different sizes, with the main body of the pocket worked flat in one piece and the exterior pockets sewn on at the end. You also have the option of adding screw rivets and a coordinating clasp that make it look even more toolbelt chic. 

The design is worked with a loop of knit fabric at the top so it can slide onto a belt. The pattern includes explanatory diagrams, photo and video tutorials and is adjustable to fit different sizes of belts. 

It’s almost enough to make me want to start wearing belts again, even though I haven’t for years. Because who wouldn’t want a few extra little pockets to hold things when you don’t have enough to really justify carrying a bag around? 

The pattern is available in English and French on Ravelry and you can also buy a kit complete with the yarn, rivets and clasp (the pattern is not included in the kit) direct on Etsy. 

[Photo: Beatrice Mase]