My chum Zoe sells her fabulous bags at markets. On a visit to her stall on a damp and chilly Sunday, I noticed that she was wearing some flip-top mittens while she tried to serve customers in a howling wind-tunnel. The tops of the mittens were dragging along the table top, catching on things and getting in the way and they were made from a nasty thin-looking acrylic that could not have been keeping her hands warm at all. A-ha, I thought. Better mittens needed. This is a situation that calls for a KNITTER! And failing a proper knitter being available, I’ll have a crack at it.

I checked with knitting mentor Itsagift and asked for recommendations of patterns for convertible mittens. Her advice was to forget them, as they just become annoying and hard to manage. Just find a fingerless mitten pattern that you like and knit the fingers part longer. Then when you want to use your hands, roll the knitted tube back like a polo neck on a jumper. When you want to be warmer, roll it back up again. Brilliant! Hers looked cool: link text

I ignored Zoe’s requests for fine, silk-merino yarn because I found some gorgeous Manos in colours that just won’t allow you to feel cold. The dodgy camera phone pics don’t do the yarn justice, but I swear you feel warmer just looking at this stuff. It was a bit thinner than the pattern required, but I used 5.5mm needles and hoped for the best.

This is the pattern I used before for the crazy alpaca mittens and it’s still pretty good link text. I decided to teach myself to magic loop with this project, which I did not enjoy, but it’s still better than DPNs so I pressed on.

The finished mittens were being modelled in a garden at work just as a busload of Chinese tourists arrived, all armed with fancy cameras and at least one tripod per couple. Zoe was posing with her hands against a variety of spring foliage backdrops and assuring me that she didn’t feel at all uncomfortable. Unkindly, I still made her frolic amongst the azaleas - we all have to suffer for my art …