Welcome to the 11th pattern in our Migraineur book-release party! The book is LIVE and here is the ordering info:
Buy Migraineur softcover book on Amazon.ca (also available on Amazon.com and other marketplaces)
If you want a complimentary ebook with your purchase of a physical book, forward your receipt to osbornfiber@gmail.com with your ravelry name. Offer good untill December 31. Please allow 24 hours for your request to be processed.
If you want digital only: Buy Migraineur ebook on Ravelry
Today I’ll share the penultimate pattern in the series, the mitten counterpart to last time’s Fragilehead: Fragilehands.
Conveniently, the height of a hat is not too different from the height of a mitten, so fitting the same gradient pattern on both makes a perfectly matched set. With the same simple fair isle pattern all the way around the mitten, both hands are worked the same; you don’t have to worry about rights and lefts.
I’ve mentioned before how much I like a matched accessory set. Up here, winter is long, and you spend a lot of time in outwear. Even at the hockey rink, I’m usually sitting around in hat and mitts for a while. Having a matchy-matchy set makes me feel quite put-together.
The Arctic colourway above was inspired not only by the meltwater view from an airplane I described last time, but also by the feeling of emotional fragility I often find at the edge of a migraine. I’m not a very emotionally demonstrative person – I’m not a big crier, for example. But sometimes when I’m under a lot of stress, and I feel the pain threatening, it’s accompanied by an emotional sensation of needing to cry even if I can’t. It’s that emotional fragility after which I named this trio of patterns.
For the alternative colourway, I was inspired by a different kind of emotional fragility – holding back from anger. Stress can also make me more likely to explode! Managing to take a deep breath and control my tone – or more often, apologizing for losing my temper – is another kind of fragility. From that, I developed the Volcanic colourway you see below. While still traveling from dark at the brim to light at the crown, here the metaphor goes from solid to liquid.
Akumalik’s parka goes perfectly with set. (I’ve been wearing this set around town this last week; I like how it looks with my coat.) It’s a very different kind of gradient, with different levels of contrast between each shade. But I like it a lot, especially the inclusion of dark blue Lochan as the second colour. It is admittedly challenging to work with it against the close hue of black Bruce, but it’s only for a few rows, and I think it’s worth it for the way that the cool blue makes the reds glow even hotter.
As with other fair isle mittens in this set, I do strongly recommend you try knitting these inside out! I find it takes away all my worries about tight floats in a small circumference. With both hats and mitts, try swapping hands so that whichever colour is part of the diamond you are knitting at the time is in your left hand. It helps the tesselating diamonds to all pop evenly.
My interpretations of Fragile are very emotional – I wonder what yours will be?
Thank you to Kelly Quinn for knitting both hat and mittens in the Volcanic colourway, and to Rebekka, Marikah, and Akumalik Sanguin for modeling.
Osborn Fiber Studio 