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Knit Mittens Inspired by Delft Pottery

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knit mittens inspired by delft potteryKat at Just Crafty Enough is going strong with her challenge to design and knit a pair of mittens every month this year. The June installment was inspired by the Delft pottery she saw during a recent trip to the Netherlands.

The blue and white mittens are classic, with a floral motif on the front and little diamonds on the back. I like the cuff treatment that looks like a little city skyline.

They’re really cute and a great little colorwork project if you’re new to these skills. They’d be a great gift for someone whose heritage includes the Netherlands as well. Or knit them in any two colors for a pretty look regardless of their original inspiration.

Nice going, Kat!

[Photo via Just Crafty Enough.]

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. Debra Hinojosa – just click on the “June Installment” link and it will take you to a page with the pdf pattern link.

    Looks beautiful doesn’t it? I think I’ll make these for this coming winter in Minnesota!

Have you read?

Knit Back at AI Patterns with the AIlephant

Lots of craft designers are understandably frustrated about the proliferation of AI “designed” patterns and photos of projects that have no basis in reality. People who don’t know how to tell if a project is AI are often also frustrated when they see a picture for something but there’s no pattern because it’s not real, or they buy a pattern that doesn’t actually explain how to make the thing or ends up looking totally different from the picture. 

Some designers have taken it upon themselves to try to make some of those AI patterns that we see online, often with hilarious results. 

Katherine Foster was inspired by a famous AI elephant to make what she calls “AIlephant,” which is now a free knitting pattern on Ravelry. 

Her prototype uses worsted weight yarn, but you can use whatever yarn you like to make different sizes of elephants. 

The elephant features a cable running down the trunk and a different cable pattern on the back. It’s worked in pieces that are joined and stuffed as you go. It uses German short row shaping on the body and includes written instructions as well as a chart for the cable patterns. 

Reading through the pattern, it sounds a little fiddly, which makes sense because it was designed to look like a pattern that isn’t real. But it’s doable, as evidenced by the handful of projects you can find on Ravelry. The ears on her version aren’t quite as big and round or maybe don’t sit in quite the same place as the AI version (which if you haven’t seen it there’s a photo of that on the projects page, too). But it’s a pretty honest replica of a dishonest photo, and a really cute elephant in its own right. 

If you make this one I would love to hear about it!

You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Katherine Foster]