It's been more than a month

This blogging thing is hard!!  In the beginning, I thought quite a bit about whether or not I wanted to start a blog.  At the time, I thought "I have so much I want to write about, I really should..."  And then, I allow days... weeks...  even months to go by with nary a word.  Sorry about that!   Part of my difficulty has been in trying to decide what I want this blog to be about.  Yarn?  Knitting?  Life in General?  Rather than fret about that, I've decided I should start with a goal.  Write at least one post a week.  See where that takes me.  So, here goes...

I am participating in a Knit-Mittens-along.  Everyone in the group is knitting mittens during this month of June.  I didn't start knitting my first mitten until June 14th, but I really started working on my mitten at the beginning of June.

Yarn.  First off, I wanted to try out some new yarn I have to dye.  It's an 8-ply sport weight yarn in 100% superwash merino.  Can you say "soft"?  I knew that I wanted autumn colors in my mitten.  So I dyed up the yarn in a pumpkin orange, rusty-red, brown, green, and blue.  I was very happy with the results:

Then, to pick out a pattern for the mitten.  I knew I wanted to do a stranded mitten with this beautiful autumn-y yarn and natural for the background.  I thought I was going to pick a pattern in the Magnificent Mittens book by Anna Zilboorg, but then, a fellow mitten-a-long-er sent a link to a Norwegian Mitten Template, which you can find here.  I took that template and re-created it in Microsoft Excel.  Now I could play with colors and patterns to my hearts content and create my very own mitten!  I got out my Traditional Scandinavian Knitting book by Sheila McGregor out and started looking for patterns.  The first attempt that I actually knitted up looked like this:

It's pretty, but the color changes in the yarn are very short and the result is that they are competing with the pattern rather than complementing it.  Ironically, the pattern I'd chosen for the palm of the mitten really appealed to me as a primary pattern, so, I reknit the mitten, using the pattern I'd designed for the palm as the back of the hand, and an even simpler pattern for the palm.  The finished mitten:

The actually knitting of the mitten was really fast, after casting on June 14th, by June 16th I had a finished mitten!  Now...  to knit the second mitten.