The Knitting Hour: O.W.L. Mitts Hours 1-5

I was hoping to get to some sewing this week, but wasn’t able to.  In part, that is because some of my sewing supplies are still lost in my jumble of craft materials.  I also spent a large part of my weekend preparing and then making sushi with some close friends of mine.  So, I thought that I might start working on my second sock, only to find that I still can’t find that darn ball of yarn.  I still blame the dog, or the cat.  I did, however, find my second set of needles.

After I wound all of my yarn skeins, I finally caved and cast on not 1, but 2 new knitting projects.  One of them I’ll share when I’m done, probably next week, since it’s a relatively small one.  The other is the pair of O.W.L. mittens that I am making for a friend for Christmas.  She picked out the yarn and I’m doing the knitting.  Yay!  The pattern comes from the Unofficial Harry Potter Knits magazine that also has the Dumbledore socks in it.

Hour 1:  Casting on and rib knitting

Sarah, my friend whom these are for, choose a beutiful burgundy and grey from the Cascade 220 line for her mittens.  They happen to be the colors of my high school, so every once and a while I get flash backs and think I’m knitting a bobcat or something.  The cast on and the ribbing knit up pretty quickly.  I just used a long-tail cast on.

Hour 2: Finishing the ribbing.

These really do seem to be knitting up faster than the socks.  I think part of it is that I’m in the knitting groove again, and part of it was that the ribbing pattern is easier for me to follow than the seeded rib from the socks.  Anyways, by the end of hour 2 I had finished the ribbing and started on the pattern.  I also added an additional row of contrast and color before starting the pattern since I really didn’t care for how close the text is to the bottom in the original pattern.

Hour 3.5 – Patronus

Ok, so here is where it gets a bit tricky to document.  I took my picture after the first row of text.  Since I only did a row at a time here or there, it’s hard for me to get an idea of exactly how long it took to knit up the section.  I checked this morning, and it took me about 10 min. or so to knit up a single row.  So I think it’s taking me about 1.5 hours.  For now, that’s how I will label them.  It will help with my OCD to take the picture at the end of each text block, especially since I’m only knitting a row or two at a time.

Hour 5:  Incendio

Here is the next text block.  I’ll try to take a picture from both sides from here on out.

There you have it, a few hours of knitting.  At five hours, that’s 1 hour for each week night.  Not bad. As you may have noticed, I’ve started to take my pictures on a piece of unfinished wood, and I think I like the results a lot better than the black or the cream canvas.  What do you think?