A monster from the deep...

... or at least that's what it looked like when the Resident Radiologist fished it out from beneath his boot last week.

Can you guess what it is? Yep - it's one of my Chrysanthemum mittens.
It must have dropped out of my bag one day when I was getting my daughter out of her car seat. Subsequently, it languished in the gutter for a few days in some truely horrible weather, right up until the RR stood on it and it went squelch.

I have to admit, I had a serious think about whether it was worth trying to resurrect it. I even considered knitting it again, but I don't have enough yarn left and don't want to buy more. Eventually, I rinsed off the worst of the mud and soaked it in a large basin of water overnight. In the morning it went through a wool wash in the machine with delicates detergent.

It will never be the same again, but it's wearable and warm and the pattern is still detectable. It's also considerably greyer than it was, slightly hairier, and a centimeter smaller, but with wear it's stretching out a bit.

Stranded Mittens - Chrysanthemums

I've been bitten quite severely by the stranded colourwork bug recently and these mittens were the culprit! I saw them on Knitty when they were published and just knew I had to try them.

 I'm not proficient at knitting with a different colour in each hand with DPNs, though I do manage it with longer straight needles, so the first mitten was an agony of pick one colour up and knit a stitch, pick the other colour up and knit a stitch (especially on the cuff). In addition to this , although I thought I was spacing my stitches well enough, once I finished, I found the work was puckered and that the floats were, in general, not long enough.

There is a clear improvement between the first and second mitten and they're lovely and soft and warm to wear. In addition, they go perfectly with my Beret de Printemps, though this was not intentional!
I love the traditional Scandinavian palm, thumb and striped cuff, but I'm not sure I'd bother with the picot edge again.

Details:
Yarn: Artesano Alpaca 4ply
Needles: 2.25mm DPNs
Pattern: Chrysanthemum by Heather Desserud, published in Knitty, Winter 2010

Since knitting these, I've finished a second pair of stranded mittens that are Christmas knitting, so not for blogging until January, and am contemplating a stranded colourwork jumper....