My friend asked me to replace the mittens I made for him, oh, at least 10 years ago. He is an amazing fellow - he is 94 years old and wears his mittens nearly every day during the winter on his 5-mile walks.

I took these pictures in 2017 and am sure that the mittens were pretty old by then, so I am having a bit of difficulty remembering how I made them.

I do remember that I used one of her May mitten patterns as a starting point. I generally like to work with wool, hand-dyed or natural colors, but my giftee is not the hand-washing-woollies type, so I am using a blended acrylic/superwash wool yarn to make life easier for him.

I started with i-cord, 56 stitches, and then knitted the wristbands with a 14-stitch snowflake pattern.

Things were getting a bit out of hand :) in that the mittens were looking a bit huge. So I went down a needle size and put in a nifty braid at the beginning. I did continue knitting on one of the first wrists so that I could work out thumb issues. I am patching together ideas from the old mitten, Elizabeth Zimmerman’s pattern, and advice from the mother of all Norwegian mitten books, Selbu Votter by Anne Bårdsgård.

I even managed to make a left and a right mitten, something that I have in the past forgotten to do. Do you see how the wrist curves in under the thumb? That is something I got from EZ; it helps the mitten to sit better at the narrowest part of the wrist. Miraculously, the number of wrist decreases is exactly made up for by the number of thumb increases. By the time you have knitted your way to the over-the-thumb part of the mitten, you are once again in possession of just the right number of stitches.

Here is one mitten, on the way to being finished. The three edge stitches on each side provide the stage upon which the decreases are performed. It is simply a matter of skpsso at one end and k2tog at the other end, with that middle stitch keeping things honest. The white yarn is used for both decreases.

. . . that is, slip 1, knit 1, pass the slipped stitch over - the stitch slants to the left.

. . . that is, knit 2 together - the stitch slants to the right.

The mittens turned out to be just about 1/2” shorter than I liked, so I unravelled the decrease sections and re-knitted them. I like the patterning better this way.

The pattern got a little wonky at one side of the the decreases, but I can live with that.

I do love steeks anywhere and everywhere, even if they are just decorative.