Completed Transformer mittens

I knit them in the round, so there are no seams, and the logos are done in intarsia. I was expected the intarsia in the round to be complicated, but it's really suprisingly simple. There was a bit of.. confusion, and the left hand one ended up being a bit smaller than the right, but hopefully that won't be too noticeable. I'm not entirely happy with the top of the autobot logo, I think the black crest is way too big, and it would probably be better to have left this out or at least have made it a lot smaller. The decepticon one I'm very happy with though.

A couple of knitting points:

First, intarsia in the round. I think people make this out to be quite a bit more complicated than it is, and the dpns particularly help a lot. If you put all the stitches for one intarsia block on one needle, then all you need to do it knit up to that needle, twist the yarns together as you would in normal intarsia, then purl back to the other end. When you get there, knit along that needle until your yarns are back together, twist, and continue. If your intarsia bit isn't a rectangle, once you get the two yarns together, slip the appropriate number of stitches from the intarsia needle onto the adjacent ones, and carry on. Essentially you're just knitting two flat pieces and twisting the yarns at the end of each row to hold them together. I suppose it might be a little trickier if you had a lot of different intarsia blocks.

Second, the mixed stranded-intarsia thing. For the purposes of these mittens, the logo forms one block with two yarns worked as stranded knitting, and the rest is the other. If you're doing this, I think you need to be very careful about how tightly you work the floats, particularly on the turns. (You can see me doing this wrong at the top of the autobot logo) I found working the other block first each time helped a lot with this, but otherwise I'd just try to leave the extra thread very loose. Maybe this is just me knitting too tightly though.

Third, there's a purl row just above the cuff to form a border, which is immediately followed by some increases for the wrist. I think this makes the border a little uneven, and with hindsight I would have put in a couple of plain rows between the two. I suspect not putting shaping too close to borders, where there are straight lines to disrupt, might be a good general principle.

Anyway, I'm very happy with them, and am trying to think of excuses for more mittens so I can play with this more :o) The mittens will be on their way to their new home sometime in the next couple of days.
Hope you like them!
Hugh.