Last week I wrote about how unhappy I was with the crummy sewing job I did on the liners. So I decided to hand sew them by back stitching. The result was much better although it was time consuming.

By the time I got to this stage in the game I was feeling pretty proud of myself until I tried the mitts on. Now these are for my daughter who has thinner hands than me, but even for her the fingers felt a little snug. I’m not sure why this happened because initial fittings were fine. The fingers felt good. Whatever happened, error on my part or knitting gremlins, I had to figure out something.

I went from fingers in the mitts to no fingers.

Just as in life, knitting doesn’t always go the way you thought. Hopefully everything turns out though.

Overall I’m happy with the final project. A few things of note for the next pair of lined, flap mittens I make:

• While still knitting with a tighter gauge make the mitts a little big to accommodate for the liner
• Make the liner pattern with a larger seam allowance – half an inch
• Add stitches if needed to create larger fingers or don’t make fingers at all

Merry Christmas, happy knitting and I’ll see you next year!

The steps were pretty easy to create the mitten liners, however my gut told me that there should be more of a seam allowance. My thought being you can trim the excess fabric after sewing. But the video says you don’t need much seam allowance. I should have listened to my gut.

So I use my paper pattern and traced it onto layers of fleece – leftover from a Halloween costume.

This next step I was dreading. The sew machine and I are not friends We are not on speaking terms and every time I try to use the thing bad things happen. This wouldn’t be an exception.

So the seams were so small that the fabric kept bunching up or I would miss a section and have to sew back over it. I swore, swore a lot and maybe even cried a little. These crummy liners took a hour and half to sew.

I wasn’t happy with them and decided to try something else which I’ll tell you about next week.

One thing I find annoying about making mittens is that once the weather gets below a certain temperature they don’t keep your hands warm anymore. The best fix for this is a fleece liner. Also using smaller needles then the suggested ones and adjusting your gauge helps. The tighter stitches mean less cold can get through.

I did both for these mitts. I found this video on YouTube that was quite helpful.

More of the mitten adventure to come next week…