My friend Katherine recently made a knitted muff from an 1847 pattern. She has a great blog post about how she did it with the complete pattern. This tickled my fancy for a few reasons. 1. saying “muff” repeatedly in a blog entry (snerk, I am an adult). 2. We’re deep in planning for Remembrance Day weekend this year so I have Mid-Victorian on the brain. And 3; I can’t close the knitting basket (it’s a big basket) due to all the yarn in there due for a project or mostly leftover from a project. So I grabbed some silk-bamboo leftovers and decided to have a go.
I don’t do subtle
I used size 8 needles and Paton’s silk-bamboo-something-I-bought-two-years-ago-and-lost-the-label-for. The only change I made to Katherine’s pattern was to increase the number of stitches I cast on to 56. The original pattern was for a child’s muff, and well Katherine has child sized hands!
The way you knit it with two colors makes a cool overlay effect. I think I liked it better on Katherine’s more subtle pink and white…buuuut this is what was in the basket.
close up of meshy mesh
I made draw strings out of self yarn but they didn’t seem like enough so then I added purple bows. Why purple? I have this ribbon still left over from my wedding. It. Never. Ends.
Overall? I feel pretty meh about it. I used ever last scrap of blue yarn I had and barely got it to 16″ long so the muff isn’t as big as I wanted it. and I was scraping by on fumes to get the tassels out of the cream so they seem kinda piddly to me. Apparently I like big fluffy muffs [insert inappropriate comment]. But I’m really glad I did it, by far this was the most complicated thing I’ve ever knitted, and the first with two colors! (odd then that it was just a rectangle).
So anyone want a blue muff?
SewLoud 