Completed shadow mittens

The shadow mittens are complete!
They're great fun to play with, and I'm very pleasantly suprised by how well the pattern appears.
The shaping is mostly based on Knitty's Manly mitts, but I hurriedly reworked the shaping at the top to make it lie flatter.
I should say that the pattern turns out particularly well in these photos - turns out that lighting is a bit of an issue, being lit from an angle makes the pattern show up wherever you're looking from, and the camera flash conceals this.


A couple of problems - shadow knitting is naturally stretchy, so I'm a little concerned that wearing them a lot will pull them out of shape, make the ridges less pronounced and the pattern harder to see. I'm also concerned that being raised, the ridges will tend to wear quite quickly. I'll have to see how that goes.
Also, the stripes don't quite line up on the thumbs. I think this can be nicely fixed by carrying the stripes on from the outside of the thumb gusset rather than the inside - the extra row on the inside cancels with the row lost while picking up.

Colour-wise, I'm very happy with the decision to add the vertical stripes on the cuffs. They smooth the transition from narrow cuff to slightly wider mitten-body nicely, and I really like how the main body is mostly purple, but on the cuff the blue dominates.

Stripy shadow mittens

Inspired by James's current shadow knit scarf project, I've been dying to try some shadow knitting of my own, hence these mittens.

Shadow knitting(also illusion knitting) uses stripes of contrasting colours, using stocking stitch and reverse stocking stitch to create ridges. Making patterns in the ridges lets you add pictures which only show up from certain angles. I'm using this book as a guide, and it seems very good.

So, the plan for these mittens is to have a big "L" and "R" on the back of each hand. Happily, the hands seem to work out just the right size to make a clear "R" shape(because shadow knitting patterns repeat every four rows, I think they need to be pretty big).
To break up the horizontal stripes a bit, I wanted to add some vertical stripes to the ribbing on the cuffs - knitting them stranded, with the purl parts one colour and the knit parts the other(I'm told this is called corrugated ribbing), but there are some issues here, corrugated ribbing isn't a springy as normal rib, so it won't grip as well. To get around this I decided to rib half of the cuff normally and half corrugated, hopefully this will be enough to keep it in place and enough of a stripe to look good.
It'll be interesting to see how it feels to wear too, since the ridges make for a slightly odd texture on the inside.

Hugh.