Back to normal
I’ve learned a few things over the last two weeks. I found that I have anti lock brakes on my car, I’ve had the car for nine years without discovering this but it was a pleasant surprise to find them when I needed to brake to avoid an accident going downhill in the snow. I found that wearing socks over your boots is just as good for avoiding slips on ice and snow as it was forty years ago (although still not good enough to cope with the freezing rain that coated the floor as well as the side of the car). I now know that the thermometer on my car goes down at least as far as minus six and that it takes an hour to walk to school and back in four inches of snow. When shovelling snow my thoughts were of ear flaps and stranded knitting rather than of beaded straps and bag construction because this last two weeks has really brought home to me that wool is what you want to be wearing when it’s cold outside.
The ice has nearly all gone now thanks to raised temperatures and heavy rain but I’m still holding onto that thought that warmth is good. In general I don’t knit the same pattern twice although exceptions can be made for things that are intriguingly constructed such as the BSJ There are so many really good mitten patterns out there that I see no reason to repeat myself but as this is a replacement ?I thought that it should be the same pattern as the original. I finished the first pair of Anemoi mittens in March 2007 and they found their way into my aunt’s Christmas stocking later that year. She loved them, they were the warmest mittens she’d ever had and she wore them all of that winter.She was wearing them all of this winter too, right up to the moment when she lost one of them on a shopping trip before Christmas. She retraced her steps in an effort to find the missing mitt but it was gone for good.
The original yarn went into a woven scarf so I didn’t try to match the colour, grey goes with everything after all. I bought this yarn once upon a time for making a pair of stranded gloves. I messed the pattern up in the same place that I’d messed it up the first time I’d started knitting it, ripped the lot and stuck the yarn back in the drawer. Both the dark and the light are Araucania Ranco Multy and I thought that they had enough contrast to carry the pattern. You can see in the cuff that the light yarn has one length of darker grey, where this runs against a lighter grey in the darker yarn then the pattern vanishes. It’s infrequent enough that I can live with it, the end result will be as warm as the original and my aunt will be pleased to have a new pair of mittens.
This is my next project, the cold snap has reawakened my love of knitting to the extent that I’m queuing up warm woolly accessories. I’m pleased with this one so far, although having said that, until I cast on there’s not that much that can go wrong.
