Knotty Mouse

I’ve been in a fall state of mind and wishing that the weather would cooperate with me.. but alas, its still in the high 80’s here in GA. I’ve spent the last week getting my supplies out and set up in the kitchen where I’ve been keeping myself busy making and assembling stitch marker sets for the shop… you can see some of them in the photos above. <insert blatant self promotion here> This means that the Mousie Masala shop is back open and ready for orders! I’ve still got some teeny tiny (smaller than a tic-tac) candy corn stitch markers to upload but that will happen in the next week and I’m going to try to upload new items every other week from now through the holiday season. </blatant self promotion>

The weather here in Georgia has been gorgeous for the last week- in the mid 70’s and overcast- thanks to the tropical storms. While I feel like I’ve done nothing but open and close windows (not an easy task in an old house) because of the wind & rain - I’m loving the cool breeze and lots of curling up on the couch with a cup of hot tea and some knitting. Fall weather puts me in a crafty mood and I’m doing a lot of knitting & spinning lately (plus some other stuff) in preparation of re-opening my Etsy shop. While I will still be doing the knitting & spinning supplies, I’ve also wanted to introduce a line of hand knits made with my own handspun into the shop.. which required the creation of some patterns of my own.

These mitts are the product of my hit or miss pattern making skills - which apparently involve a whole lot of ripping, swearing, use of a calculator, more swearing, and prayer - and I’m pretty happy with them. They have right & left thumb gusset increases which I think helps to make a better fitting hand area.. something I’ve really had issue with in some of the patterns I’ve knitted for myself and ended up ripping out or giving away. I think its partially because I have larger hands and very slender wrists that many of the popular armwarmer/mitt patterns out there end up making me look like I had giant man hands even though they were perfectly gorgeous on 1500 other knitters.

The hands in the photo belong to my mother-in-law who agreed to play hand model for me the other day. I had to pry these mitts off of her hands because she first tried to run away with them and then tried to con them out of me as a Christmas present. The yarn is my own Two Paws Handspun in Spunky Eclectic “Leaf Peep” colorway & South African Fine wool. I like to re-name my yarns when I spin them because I find that the colorway that was given as roving changes into something else after spinning… but I haven’t come up with a name for this yarn yet. The mitts themselves will be going into my shop when I open in September.. unless MIL comes and steals them back!