After five long years I finally finished studying! Everyone was thrilled, especially my long-suffering friends, who’ve put up with much whingeing and cancelling of social events while I slogged away. And don’t get me started on the semester of meltdowns that was the winter of advanced statistics ….

I’m incredibly lucky to have friends who still speak to me, let alone want to take me out to celebrate the end of the course, but that’s what Matt and Mikey decided to do. I’m sure they would have preferred that I cook dinner for them as a thank-you for all their support, but instead I decided that fingerless mittens would be just the thing. Not sure why - perhaps I knew that I wouldn’t get anything else sorted out in time.

I used leftover yarn with all the brinksmanship that this entails for me, and very nearly got away with it. Mikey’s mitts were a bit smaller and I had more of the Rustic, so they were relatively knitastrophe-free. I used the 3.5mm needles and they took 52g in total to do, which included five extra rows of rib, five extra rows before the increases and five extra rows before the final rib. The thumbs were four rows of ribbing.

Matt’s mitts used some Nundle and Skeinz leftovers so they would match his scarf and hat made with that yarn. I had only 21g of the Silver Lining and thought that would be enough to do the ribbing - how wrong could I be? I ran out of yarn during the second mitten and had to go back and re-knit the first thumb in the Nundle navy, just to make it all match. It’s fair to say that I was wearing my crankypants after that fiasco but at least I got it all finished. I started with about 50g of the Nundle and was left with about 9g afterwards. I had 40cm of the Silver Lining and the beginnings of a nervous breakdown by the time I cast off for the absolute last time, and that was including the same number of extra rows as for Mikey’s mittens.

The mittens were presented and unwrapped in a very fancypants restaurant and the lads were cheerfully waving their hands around like an incredibly amateurish mime group, much to the delight (?) of the staff. I just got stuck into the champagne, because it was my party, after all ….