Toddler Mittens

I'm getting close to the end of my pregnancy, and I haven't been feeling so motivated to work on my sewing projects lately.  Instead I've spent a few evenings with my knitting.  You already saw how I redid a little red hat, but in our winter gear was also one lonely mitten that was just the right size for Kid 2 and had a matching hat.  I knit this set years ago, and sometime along the way one of the mittens went missing.  I am not a very experienced knitter, but I can knit simple things, and mittens fall into this category for me.  Knitting mittens for small people is a nice project because it doesn't use up a lot of yarn or time.  Both are pluses for me.

This is a pattern I made up as I went along, so I am happy to share it with you.  Please let me know about any problems so that I can fix them.  As I said, I am not an experencienced knitter, and there is probably a better way to knit mittens, but this is what I did and they turned out rather well.

Click "read more" for the full pattern. 

Knit Hat Redo

When my first son was born four years ago, I knit him this little red toque (knitted hat for my American friends) to wear for his first winter. 



It hardly got worn because it didn't fit that well on top, but mostly because it never stayed down over his ears.  I feel like a hat that fails to cover your ears is pretty useless.  So it has sat in the bin with our winter gear ever since.  This year when I pulled out the bin, I decided I should do something about this hat.  After all, it's nice red wool, and I knew I could fix it.  And since my new goal is to 'get stuff done', I made myself work on it last week.  I'm glad I finally got around to it (keep in mind it took 4 years), so now I can use it with my new baby this winter.



This really was a really easy fix.  If you know how to knit (even just a little), you can make these kinds of updates to existing hats that need ear flaps.  I picked up some stitches on each side of the hat, and decreased my stitches (to make a triangle shape) by knitting two together at the end of every other row.  When I got to the bottom (5 stitches left), I just cast off.  I finished it off by adding a tassel to each flap.



When I finished the flaps, I noticed a small hole in near the top, and since the top didn't fit that well anyways, I decided to just redo that part as well.  So I took off the pompom and pulled out the stitches until I got the spot on the hat where I wanted it to started getting tighter.  I followed this pattern for closing up the top.



As you can see, my tension wasn't exactly the same as when I knit this hat originally, but I decided that I didn't care enough to do it again.  Sometimes done is more important than perfect.  I think this is especially true when you are nine months pregnant.