Beethoven Mittens finished!

The Beethoven mittens are finished!
The basic design aims to be quite simple, with a single colour and minimal shaping. 
The flip tops are a little more involved - the fingers and the thumb both flip back, which I find really useful when moving in and out of cold places, and for fiddling with phones and things.  Making the thumb flip back is slightly unusual, but I find you need that too, particularly for smartphones.
I was expecting the openings to be more of a problem - with two layers of rib, they're quite thick, which I thought might be a bit awkward, but seems fine.

I changed the text from what I had planned, so the final two lines are:
"Alle Menschen werden Bruder"
"Und der Cherub steht vor Gott"
I decided that I liked the contrast between the two statements.
The font is aiming to be a little gothic, so the letters are tall, narrow and angular, and the heights are a little quirky.
This was quite fiddly, and took a few goes at it.  The problem with writing is that you have to figure out coherent rules and principles for all the letters, so they have a consistent look and feel.

I was amazed how much space they took too - I thought this would fit easily, but it was pretty close.

So, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out!  I'm enjoying wearing them, and they're a great reminder to be joyful all the time :)

*edit - realised later that I'd missed an "n" from "Menschen".  I went back and corrected that, but forgot to take a photo afterwards.  Ah well.*

Happy knitting!
Hugh.

Lobster mittens

This project may be a bit self-explanatory.
They're influenced by these:
Duck booties
And a general love of animal clothing.
Whenever I where mittens, I find I have to adjust to the different types of hand movement they allow - you have to get used to moving your hand as a whole, and you can't use your fingers in the same way.  This means you end up developing a totally different way of handling objects.  So, with these mittens I thought with these mittens it'd be fun to play with this idea a bit.

Since you have to get used to this different style of movement, these mittens mean you also get to pretend you're a lobster!
The design is aimed to be slightly subtle, just a matter of shaping- The main section decreases from the outside, and the thumb is pointed and to the inside and extends a way beyond the end of the thumb.
They're fun to wear, not entirely impractical (you have to be careful with the thumb part), and you get to whoop like Dr Zoidberg!

Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop!
Hugh.

Ode to mittens

It's been a while since I last posted here, but I've found a little more time for knitting lately, so have some new projects to share!

With one thing and another, I've ended up listening to a lot of Beethoven lately, particularly the Ode to Joy (Beethoven is great music to code to).  It's a beautiful piece of music, but it's the lyrics which make it absolutely stunning:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_%28Beethoven%29#Text_of_the_fourth_movement

It's an incredible poem about the power of joy, bringing all people together as equals, touching on love, friendship, division, pain and longing for God.  If you're not familiar with it please do read it (and listen!), it will absolutely be worth your time.  It's also the anthem of the European Union, and if one piece of music can sum up all that's best and most noble about the EU project, it's this.

So, I'm a fan.  And what better way to express that than with mittens?  So my plan is to make a pair of flip-top mittens (because all mittens should have flip-tops), which will have a couplet from the Ode to Joy written across them.  It's hard to pick out just two lines, there's so much in there, but for me these are the central ones:

"Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
Und die Cherub steht vor Gott"

"The worm was given desire for life,
And the Cherub stands before God"

One other thing - rather than writing this across the backs, where it will be more visible, I want to write it across the palms.
I always feel that writing slogans on things is about how you present yourself to the world, how you would like other people to see you.  What I want here is quite the opposite, it's about how you live inwardly.
This'll mean that they'll be outwardly fairly plain, with the text not visible most of the time - I think that's quite appropriate too.

Happy knitting!
Hugh.

Slogany mittens

Ok, I should post about this now for time reasons.
The idea for this comes from a discussion about Lisa-Anne Auerbach's knitting. LAA knits amazing designs with witty slogans on them, and is quite simply amazing. You can find her on Ravelry, and she also has a couple of websites. Her subjects are usually political, often provocative and always genius. My project won't actually look anything like hers, but I really wanted to plug her work.

So, sloganny mittens. The idea is to have a pair of mittens, with a slogan on each.
On the right:

"Community,
Identity,
Stability."

The motto of the world-state from Brave New World. And on the left:

"Listen!
Avoid Magic!
Be Aware!"

A saying from a short story "Solitude" by Ursula le Guin(in the collection "The Birthday of the World").
The first is the guiding principle behind the perfect(in some sense) human society, in which everyone is cared for and looked after, everyone is content and noone wants for anything. It's also entirely social - noone does anything individually or has(or needs) any privacy.
The second is a saying from what le Guin describes as a society of introverts - they live alone, not intruding on each other, everyone in perfect freedom. The meanings of the three phrases are a little obscure, and exactly what is meant by them is kind of the point of the story(go read it!).
So the two slogans are kind of opposite, but neither is really the whole story by itself - Brave New World is written as a dystopia, this perfect world is in it's own way a nightmare scenario, as would be the world of "Solitude".

I wanted to post this now because I notice radio 4 have a programme about Ursula le Guin up just now - it was broadcast on Tuesday, so folks in the UK will still be able to find it on iPlayer(I think iPlayer is only available in the UK, but I could be wrong?)

That's the plan!
Hugh.

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.