The Terrible Thumb Trickery

In keeping with my non-random personality, I shall now write about mitten thumbs. (May as well expand it to be about mitten cuffs too, although that's more of a personal quest for enlightenment at the moment, as opposed to tension issues.)

The thumbs. You see here two mittens, rather identical except for the thumbs. Did you ever wonder about color dominance? Or ask yourself if, when push came to shove, it really mattered which hand you held which color in? Or, if you don't bother using the TWO hands the good Lord has given you to hold yarns with, how you hold them in a single hand?

Yes, Virginia, it does.

The mitten on the left has a lovely thumb. Pink, with little splotches of green, staggered 'just so.' The mitten on the right, in comparison, rather looks like the green flecks are about to take over the thumb. They are exercising dominion over the pink, are taking many steriods illegally, and are no doubt making orations to their lesser brothers on the hand to Rise Up and Conquer!

All because I don't *like* working with the yarn in my left hand, so I assigned the green to that hand since there's less of it than there is the pink. Ahem. I ignored my preferences when it came to knitting the thumb on the left. Such a cute thumb. No scary Asparagus Supremacy sprouting over there. Let that be a lesson to you. I gave the green a serious talking to (stretched the steroids right out of that thumb) and they are now behaving much better. Subdued ... until the next time.

The cuff is a much happier story. It wasn't *my* dumb error. But I wasn't quite aiming for the effect I got. It's supposed to look more entrelacquie. The pattern hinges on an adjacent m1 and k2togtbl, but I didn't know WHAT kind of m1. So I started off with a m1l, because that was the easiest to do. (I hadn't done the thumbs yet, so I didn't know to steer away from that on this particular mitten). When the results turned out Not Quite As Desired, I decided that a m1r was the thing to do. (That's the right mitten.) But as you can see, those results were even less than Not Quite As Desired. So it must (MUST) be an open m1. I've never worked anything calling for that. But I will! Because I need to write a pattern up for these mittens, and knit some up for photographs, and guess what kind of m1 I will use? You're RIGHT!

I will also hold the fleck color in my right hand while working the thumbs. Trust me.