It all started a few weeks ago when I was at the mall doing that dreaded thing called back-to-school-cloths-shopping. We passed the Build-a-bear workshop and I may have actually squealed out-loud when I saw the my little ponies in the window. Oddly enough BG was not impressed, at 6 years old apparently the thrill of a my little pony is inferior to the thrill of a stuffed bunny. Not that I should be complaining. She didn’t want one so I insisted that we make a Rainbow-dash for me… I mean for LG!!! Ehem…
So we brought the flying horse home and LG was smitten from the moment she saw the box. Did I mention we put a music box in it and it sings “Call Me Maybe” when you press it? That pony has been to every restaurant, every car ride and even on bicycle rides. Rainbow-dash goes with her to school every single day. Said pony has rainbow hair, and now LG is all about rainbows. She requested I knit her something with a rainbow. I was reading (not stalking, I swear) Susan b Anderson‘s blog and clicked through to Knit Purl Gurl on Etsy. There it was, a lovely skien of rainbow bulky yarn hand-dyed to strip with lovely rainbows and a pretty cloud and sky motif.
It was serendipity that led me to that yarn I tell ya! So of course I used my Serendipity Mittens pattern (which is a free pattern btw!) I knit it with size 11 needles, and cast on 17 stitches – 1 extra stitch because it was knit flat and the pattern is normally in the round so I needed an extra stitch to make up for the seaming. I did like knitting it flat but wasn’t a huge fan of the seam and how it bulks it up a bit, but it did make it somewhat faster to knit.
Last year we kept loosing the mittens I knit so this time I added pom-poms, and then the two ends of the string that hung down after tying the pom pom, first I used the darning needle to hook the two ends through the bottom of the mitten and then I twisted it and then allowed it to ply onto itself by folding it in half, and then I just tied it to itself at the base of the pom pom which created a little knot below the pom pom and I snipped it. We will see if it holds. I have enough leftover to make additional pom-poms and if I had not been so picky about my stripes I could have easily gotten 2 sets of mittens out of the skien.
It made me think of that lovely song from The Sound Of Music:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things
Rainbows are most certainly one of LG’s favorite things. Now to see if the girls are old enough to sit through that movie, would be fun to watch with them.