A new technique: Mosaic knitting

Recently I volunteered to test knit a pair of fingerless mitts for Greenethumb on Ravelry, her Frozen Mitts, which she designed and knitted for the same stash-busting knit-along for which I designed and knitted Kristina’s Pink Piano Mitts. They involve a colour-knitting technique called  “mosaic” or slip-stitch knitting. There’s a very good article in Knitty magazine which I read before I began. The technique involves alternating two rows of each colour and slipping the stitches of the previous contrasting-colour row. In the third row, those slipped stitches are knitted and previous-colour stitches are slipped. It’s much better explained in the article than what I’m doing here.

It turns out I had done slip-stitch knitting before with Ashley Rao’s Biarritz Cloche to create the houndstooth look of the body; so I was not a total stranger to the technique.

Ms. Greene’s instructions are excellent. She includes two charts in the pattern, one with just one line for the repeated pattern rounds, and one with both, using carets to distinguish the slipped stitches from the knitted ones. I followed both charts (one for each mitt) and found them to be very clear. I had only one issue with her instructions which caused me some grief.

The pattern calls for fingering yarn. I used Phildar Preface in cream for the main body and Spud & Chloë Fine in purple for the contrasting design. For the test, the specified needle size was 2.75 mm throughout, gauge 9 st/inch. The designer did suggest that tight knitters might use a larger needle size for the mosaic pattern, since it is by nature tighter than regular knitting.

I did not test for gauge. Mea culpa. I am also, apparently, a rather relaxed knitter. The small size, which I tested, called for 56 stitches to be cast on. I should have smelled something fishy right then and there, since I generally knit fingerless mitts for myself with 2.5 mm needles on 48 stitches. I think you can see where this is going.

I finished the first mitt and thought it looked pretty, but it fit terribly. The wrist was nice and snug, but the hand pouched and was enormous! As you can see from the photo below, the knitting tightened up again at the band of mosaic before the ribbing, but the ribbing becomes too loose afterward.

Not to be undone by this failure, I cast on for the second mitt with the 2.75 mm needle and proceeded as per the first one to the last row of the charted main colour. For the solid purple band, I switched to a 2.25 mm circular and proceeded to follow the directions for the thumb gusset and hand, switching back to the 2.75 mm needle after the first solid purple rows of the next mosaic pattern, and back to 2.25 mm for the closing purple rows. This produced a much tighter tension for the plain knitting which resulted in a nice snug fit for the hand.

I was so pleased with the new mitt that I unravelled the old one to the top of the wrist and reknit it as per the one I had just finished. Voila!

The designer and I have been in correspondence and I have strongly suggested that she specify changing needles for this problem to not be a problem.

I now have only one complaint about the pattern, and that is that the thumb gussets are knitted at the sides, meaning that the pattern is not centred when worn. I have a lot of the purple and a little of the cream left over. I may knit them again in the inverse, but this time make right and left mitts by moving the thumbs toward the palms.