Christmas Knitting

I have four great-nieces. Both my nephews have two daughters and they range from 6 ½ years to 9 months. When I went on the San Diego Yarn Crawl this year I purchased some alpaca yarn specifically to knit mittens for them as children’s mittens do not take long to knit.

The problem about making things for absent children is the size. I was able to use my granddaughter as a model for the oldest child (as an aside the mittens I knit for her last year are way too small) but for the others a certain amount of guesswork was involved but I definitely wanted them to be too big than too small. I chose a pattern from Tin Can Knits as they seem to be able to produce patterns that fit children. Although the thumb positioning in the smaller sizes looked a bit weird but a friend who knitted a pair after seeing that I had used the pattern said it was fine. Anyway, I used the World's Simplest Mittens pattern by Tin Can Knits to knit mittens for the three oldest children.

For the youngest I decided that thumbs are still to fiddly so I made Cabled Toddler Mitts.

I had purchased two different colours of alpaca from Atlas Alpacas and I used a different colour for each sibling. I’m not going to show you three pairs of mittens that are the same so here is a photograph of the tiny pair in the Bordeaux colourway and a picture of the largest pair in the Fig colourway.