Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Mitten Project

Before I started thinking about dead people today, I was going to post about the sweater mitten project that I started last night and finished this morning. I bought the materials at the Salvation Army last week (a fleece pullover and a wool sweater). Material cost, $4 for both.

First, I drew an outline of my hand on a page of the Wall Street Journal. You can see that the paper is well worth the subscription price - I can use it for multiple things! I wanted the mittens to go several inches above my wrist, so that's how I traced it. However, I gave it more ease above the wrist (drew the line farther away from my body), to allow for the arm being thicker than the hand.
I placed the paper on the fleece and drew a chalk line about 1/4 to 1/2 inch away from the paper's edge. I was lazy and didn't pin the paper to the fleece. I drew and cut out four, two with the thumb to the right, and two with the thumb to the left. Then I sewed the fleece pieces together and used the fleece undermitten as the guide for cutting the sweater. This time I did pin the undermittens cutting guide to the sweater, and cut 1/2-3/4 inch away from the fleece edge on the wool.

I sewed the wool pieces together, turned them outside out, put the fleece inside - put my hand inside - and voila! An extremely warm fleece-wool mitten for those awful winter mornings when I have to scrape off the car to go to work. I may tack the fleece and wool together in a few places and clean up the wrist a little, but altogether, this project took maybe an hour at most. Extremely quick and cheap project!




4 comments:

  1. Wow, pretty snazzy looking mittens, I'd say! Good job!

    What's next? Homemade mukluks?

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  2. Hey - good idea! I WAS actually going to make myself some mukluks, but I was sort of planning to knit them. Repurposed Salvation Army fleece-wool mukluks would be SO SO SO much warmer, and I'm all about warmer these days.

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  3. Awesome! I'm glad yours turned out so well! I'll have to take a page from your book by cutting the wool mittens larger and making the wrists wider next time. Nice selection of wool sweater, by the way. Those mittens look warm and cozy!

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  4. I think you'll probably want to tack a few places cause when your warm hands get damp or sweaty, you'll be turning them inside out of each other...hmm, does that make sense?

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