The Great Wool Experiment #5

TGWE #5 is well under way.  I started it a couple of days ago and have almost reached the point in the mitt where I start working on the thumb increases.  I love the cable, even though I didn't read the errata first and am doing it backwards.  I looked at the chart when I first started knitting the mitts, and then looked at the picture and thought it didn't look right, but I went with the chart because my knitting intuition isn't as confident as it should be.

I'm not ripping back and starting over, but the cable looks interesting and pretty so I'll keep it.

What I'm finding about working with this yarn.  It's Edelweiss by Schoeller and Stahl in a warm chocolate color.  The yarn is "woolen spun" which means that it isn't carded before spinning which makes the fibers come together in all different directions rather than being a smooth thread.  You see little halos everywhere you look with this yarn.  It's really quite lovely.

I would describe the hand as "crisp" which results in a gorgeous fat stitch.  Just look at this close up of the ribbing section of the mitt.

If you click on the photo and look at the close up you can see the "furriness" of the yarn.  It really is quite a nice look.  I agree with the designer, Clara Parkes, that these mitts need to be knitted with woolen spun yarn.  After looking at several projects on Ravely last night, the pattern comes out kind of limp in other yarns.  But in a nice crisp wooly-wool...it's truly sweet.

Knitting with the yarn has been a bit of a challenge for me.  It feels very tight on size 5 needles.  I tried on the mitt and it fits like it should, so I don't want to go up a needle size.  I thought about how I like working socks in the round on 5 DPNs, so I got out an extra set of size 5 needles to have my cable needle handy and have switched to working with 5 and it is somewhat better.  I'll see what I think tonight when I have a full 30 minutes with it in the "square" instead of in the "triangle."

And for the record, on the next mitt, I'm going to work the cable as intended so you can see the difference....I'm not too fretful over matchy-matchiness...and in the end my hands will be just as warm which is really the whole point of these lovely mitts.