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 a Mosaic Shawl Inspired by Mythology

Sometimes when I’m scrolling through Ravelry a pattern will catch my eye as much because of the name as the look of the design (which is a little hard to see in those little thumbnails sometimes, anyway). 

So it was with the Stellify shawl by Paola Albergamo. Stellify means to turn into a star, and the name and the story behind the shawl come from the story of Ariadne. The better known part of her story is that she helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur, but he then abandoned her. What comes after in many stories is that Dionysus found her, fell in love with her and later married her. 

When he threw her jeweled crown into the sky, the Corona Borealis constellation was formed. 

What does all this have to do with shawl knitting? 

The shawl itself looks like it has a scattering of stars on it, as if it, too, has been stellified. The shawl begins with an I-cord tap and is shaped into a triangular shawl with both lateral and central increases. I-cord edging is incorporated into the sides, and the colorwork is done with mosaic knitting, which means this shawl is easier than it looks. 

Mosaic knitting has you working with just one color per row, slipping stitches that appear in the other color to make the colorwork visible. Even better for people new to this kind of colorwork, the pattern includes written and charted instructions throughout so it should be easy to follow along. 

The pattern comes in two sizes (the larger one is shown here) and calls for two colors of fingering weight yarn. It looks great in black and yellow, but don’t miss the other projects on Ravelry to see other fun and beautiful color options. 

You can find the pattern in English and Italian on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Paola Albergamo]