Shrinkage

I have been doing my part to keep the winter weather from coming back: knitting warm, felted, woolly mittens. As long as I keep knitting mittens to conquer extreme cold I figure we are guaranteed 65 degrees and sunshine, and these mittens will stay on the shelf until next December. Jane says it is like washing your car to make it rain.

The Virginia Tech mittens AKA Hokie Hands:

The mitten on the left has been through a few hot water washes to shrink it down from almost 20 inches to a normal mitten size. I experimented with intarsia in the round to put a VT logo on the palms, then decided it would be winter 2020 before I worked that out. Plain stripes are the better part of valor. Chicago maroon and burnt orange are unique when it comes to college colors, not beautiful, but they did kind of grow on me.

Knitting mittens has got to have at least as much mojo as Phil the groundhog, don't you think?

(I used a cobbled together pattern from a mountain climbing forum to simulate Dachstein mittens using about $1.75 worth of thrift store wool yarn on size 10 needles. The orange is worsted weight, the maroon is 2 strands of fingering held together.)