Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Mitts to Knit for the Whole Family

by

One year I decided I wanted to knit everyone (all the women, anyway) in the family fingerless gloves. I think I knit them for my daughter’s teachers, too. There were mitts everywhere, all the time.

I love fingerless mitts because I wear them in the house throughout the winter. They’re great for teachers who have outdoor duty or anyone who gets cold hands. In my experience kids like them better than mittens because they can still use their fingers, but of course they’re not great for playing in the snow.

If you want to knit mitts for everyone this year, check out Mitt the Family from Neisha Abdulla. These DK weight mitts are worked seamlessly in the round, and they’re sized from toddler to large adult. The stitch pattern even makes them reversible, so you can turn them over if they get stained. As a person who spills coffee a lot that’s a big selling point.

The pattern in all five sizes is available from Ravelry for €2.50 or about $3.08.

[Photo: Neisha Abdulla.]

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

  1. I knitted full mitts for the xmas shoeboxes for years. Then my friend accompanied them in the truck from the UK to Rumania. She said fingerless mitts were much prized over full mitts. Though many very poor villagers lived in a state of poverty we’d find unacceptable, many had smartphones so needed fingers free, indoors in unheated homes as well as outdoors, so I make them now. Thanks for these new patterns.

Have you read?

Book Review: The Knitting Book

There are two schools of thought when it comes to instructional books about knitting. Either focus in one particular technique or kind of knitting (stranded knitting, say, or brioche) or try to cover a little bit of everything in a reference book that knitters will use throughout their careers. 

The Knitting Book by Frederica Patmore and Dr. Vikki Haffenden aims to be the second kind. The subtitle is: a step-by-step guide to creating imaginative projects for the home and to wear. I’m not sure it does that, exactly, but it does include a quick look at a lot of different techniques and stitch patterns you might use in your projects. 

A “guide to creating imaginative projects” sounds to me like it’s about design, but this book is not. There’s 1/3 of a page about altering patterns that only talks about how to add length to a sleeve and adjust where the increases go.

There’s nothing about measuring your body (the section on choosing a size in a pattern only suggests measuring a garment you already own), general garment construction, ease or stitch pattern multiples. The section on gauge (which is the last third of the page with choosing a garment size and altering patterns, discussed above) just says to knit a swatch, block and measure it to compare to a pattern, with no discussion on how you might use your swatch to design your own project or alter a pattern to meet your gauge. 

If you ignore the subtitle, what you will find is a lot of information about different kinds of knitting and various techniques you might want to try on your projects. There are 20 cast ons and 15 bind off options, for instance, all discussed before you learn how to knit or purl. (Another quibble I have with this book is the order in which things are presented, but that’s relatively minor.)

You’ll find quick hits on increases and decreases, twists and cables, lace, colorwork, textured effects like fisherman’s rib and brioche, loops, mosaic knitting, double knitting, decorative stitches, shadow knitting, bias knitting, mitered squares, entrelac and more. There are tips for selvedge stitches, knitting with beads, adding buttonholes, picking up stitches and more. 

A few patterns at the back give knitters a taste of some of the techniques included, but they’re not rated by skill level and the first one is a bias knit gradient scarf worked in six different colors of mohair, which isn’t a thing I’d wish on any beginner. 

And I guess that’s maybe what my issue with the book is. I don’t know if it’s meant for beginners and it doesn’t seem to, either. I feel like this book would be overwhelming to new knitters and doesn’t really give you a place to start or all the information you might need to do projects well.

The variety of techniques included is fun, and there are also stitch patterns in the back you can use on your own projects, but again it doesn’t really provide any guidance for how to design your own projects so I don’t know how helpful all of that is. 

I want to like books like this because having one reference that helps you with a lot of different things is great, I’m just not sure this is the one. If you can find it at your library or local book store and flip through it before buying, I think that would be a great idea to see if it’s a book that would be helpful for you. 

And if you have this book and love it please let me know! I’m sure it’s good for someone I’m just not sure who. 

About the book: 336 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by DK. Suggested retail price $40.