Felted mittens with non-felted cuffs

My LYS had a book about felting on display. The book had a section on children's mittens. It recommended casting on in cotton, knitting a few rounds, switching to wool, making the mittens, felting the mittens, removing the waste cotton and then knitting the cuff into the holes where the cotton had been.

Hmmm. Well...it would work, yes. You COULD do it that way. But...why? What a lot of work.

Try this instead:

click picture

Does it work? You bet. Did it hold up? See for yourself. Here are the same mittens after two Wisconsin winters' worth of wear by a boy, now in second grade, who wears these mittens (and no others) through every snowball fight and sledding adventure, every day at recess, after school and every other time he goes outside--and here, we've still got a foot on the ground (although thankfully, it is melting fast). These mittens are getting too small for him now, the bright colors have yellowed and faded, but he's still wearing them.

click picture

Bottom line: for ribbing on felted garments, put away that waste cotton & bring on the superwash wool.

PS: Make sure to use a non-fuzzy yarn for the shrinky-parts, or the fuzz will get into the non-shrinking cuffs and make a mess. For further information about this, go to  LIVNLETLRN,  an illustrated entry on her blog. 

PPS:  If you want to make these mittens, a pattern is available for sale ($3.25)
You can go to the pattern store on Ravelry
You can go to the pattern page on Ravelry or
you can 



--TECHknitter

(you have been reading TECHknitting on: Felted Mittens with Unfelted Cuffs)

A felting primer for hand knits (wet felting)

Felting knitting, or "what's in a name?"

Some call it fulling, and that's probably the most technically correct. Some call it "boiled wool," and you can certainly boil it, but you don't have to. I think most people call it felting, so I will too.

So, what IS felting?

This post is about wet felting.  Wet felting happens when wool is subjected to three factors simultaneously.  First, there must be WETTING; second, TEMPERATURE CHANGE and third, AGITATION.  When all three of these things happen at once, woolen fabric will shrink substantially, becoming both thicker and smaller. (There is another kind of felting done dry which is worked with barbed needles, called needle felting, Needle felting is a very handy trick, but has its own post--it is not covered here.)

Why felt?

Wet felting has two sides to its nature: the utility aspect, and beauty inherent in such a dense fabric.

utility

Felt is as close to a miracle fiber as you can make outside of a lab.  It is somewhat rain-proof, somewhat wind-proof, immensely warm and very hard-wearing--nomads in some of the world's coldest places live in felt huts, dress themselves in felted hats and boots and use felt to ride their horses. Closer to home, my kids have worn felted mittens here in Wisconsin for years: here is the same pair as shown in the opening illustration after they were worn for two years by a little boy for snowball fights, sledding and all-around tom-foolery.  An unfelted mitten would never have survived, but these are tucked away safe, waiting for another little kid who needs bomb-proof mittens.

< threadjack >
If you want to make the mittens illustrated in this post, they are available in a couple of ways:
For recipe (free)  click here
For the pattern ($3.25, child's XS-XL) you can
*Click through to the pattern page
*Click through to the project page 
*or buy the pattern now

<  / threadjack >

beauty of the fabric

However, utility knits aren't the only reason to felt.  Felting is inherent beautiful with a soft, lush look.  The stitches lose definition and meld together, the surface becomes matte. Here is a peek at the fabric of a felted cushion.  The density of the fabric not only makes it wear hard, but makes it almost luminous--the depth of the fabric reacts with light differently than a thinner or smoother or shinier fabric would, the colors seem more saturated.  Of all the cushions we have in the house, this is the one that people find themselves holding and carrying around from place to place.

Felting is irreversible

Felting is an irreversible process.  Once felted, a hand knit garment cannot be unraveled. The yarn has stuck to itself and congealed into a solid mass. This irreversibility has both downside and upside.

• On the downside, that beautiful hand knit which went into the washing machine by accident has been ruined, yes.  Nothing--not vinegar, not yogurt, not shampoo, not conditioner--can bring it back to its pre-felted state.  
• On the upside, it is the very irreversibility of the process that makes felted items so hard-wearing. Felted knitting can be cut, sewn and shaped. It will not unravel, so a felted sweater can have a long and lovely second act cut up and sewn into cozy mittens and slippers. 

Felting is unpredictable

Besides being irreversible, felting is also unpredictable.  Sometimes, felting occurs gradually and evenly across an entire garment.  More often, the process occurs suddenly and unevenly. Accordingly, felting garments to fit is something of a gamble. It is true that felted garments are commercially available--"boiled wool" jackets are a famous example. However, these garments are made from sheets of knitting which has been felted and then cut and sewn.  The jackets are not "boiled," the fabric is. For this reason, most knit-and-felt patterns are for bags, or mittens, or slippers: items where the fit isn't super-important.

Four ways to felt

The two main ways to felt are by hand, or using a washing machine.  Two other methods are by using a (clean!) toilet-plunger or by using a dryer. Whichever way you choose, however, consider turning the item inside out first, because the exposed side can get a bit roughed up by the process.

With hand-felting, you have more control over the project.  The mittens in the photo above were stopped from felting further at just the right time by having a paper pattern handy, against which the mittens were frequently compared as the size got nearer and nearer.

For larger projects, or for projects where fit is not so much of an issue, felting in the washing machine is a good choice.  Felting a large project by hand makes you realize the immense strength that the old washer-women must have had, to wrestle wet and heavy fabrics by hand.

hand felting

The basis of felting is that you knead and rub with the aid of dish-washing detergent—the suds act as a lubricant, making the rubbing easier.  (That's hand dishwashing detergent, not machine detergent!)

First, prepare a basin with cold water, and another with hot water, as hot as you can stand.  (Hint: wearing dishwashing gloves lets you use far hotter water than you could stand without them.) Wet the item to be felted in the hot water, then lift it out of the water and rub and knead a drop or two of dish detergent through it.  Hold one part of the item in one hand and the other part in the other hand, and rub the item on itself, changing your grip frequently to bring new parts into the process. Rubbing evenly all over gets the best all-over felting. 

Dunk the item into the hot water again, and begin to wash the detergent out, then abruptly dunk the item in the cold water and continue kneading and rubbing.  Again lift the item out of the water, add a drop or two of detergent, then agitate and rub for a while. Continue in the manner, alternating sudsy kneading under hot and cold shocks until the item is the size you want. The felting and shrinking usually occurs when the cold water shocks the wool, although it sometimes occurs on a hot-water shock.

Sometimes glove fingers or mitten thumbs fingers might try and felt shut.  Keep a wooden-spoon handle or chopstick handy to poke apart unwanted interior felting.

If you want to try boiling, dunk the project into a pot of boiling water , stir it with a wooden spoon, dunk it back in the cold water and do the soap and agitation cold.  Repeat. One thing about boiling is that dyes used on woolens aren't always benign. Be sure to wash the pot very thoroughly afterwards, and use only a stainless steel pot to avoid unwanted interaction of the pot-metal with the dyes. 

However you do it, this process sometimes takes a LOT longer than you think, and you might have to replace the hot water with fresh if it gets too cool.  Depending on the color and type of wool, it has taken me as long as 20 minutes of constant agitation and temperature shocks to felt one measly mitten.  Other times, however, the process takes place so fast you can hardly see it happening.  If it is taking a while, take heart: although you may doubt it while you are wrestling away, as long as the item was knit with ordinary wool (NOT SUPERWASH!!!) it will eventually shrink. 

When the item is the size you want, stop rubbing.  Let the item come to room temperature, then gently rinse out the suds in fresh lukewarm water, then lay flat to dry out of the sun. 

washing machine felting: 

top loaders vs. front loaders

The easiest machine for felting in an old-fashioned top loader you can stop in mid cycle. This lets you haul out the wet item to test the size as the process progresses.  These old top-loaders also let you re-position stuff--sometimes items to be felted get folded on themselves during the spin cycle, and the marks left behind can be hard to get rid of. Another advantage is that, on most top-loaders, you can change the cycle with the twist of a dial, easily switching from wash to rinse to spin. Yet another advantage is that you can keep cleaning the lint screen if your project sheds. Top loaders do have one important downside, though: believe it or not, a washing machine agitator can break your arm. Be sure the machine is turned OFF before you reach in. 

Felting can also be done with a front-loader.  These machines lock and it is often difficult to change the pre-set program once its started, so to get around this, choose the shortest cycle. This lets you keep checking the size after each run-through.

machine how-to

The principles of felting are the same whether by hand or machine: lots of temperature changes, lots of agitation. Each machine has different settings, so look for a heavy-duty cycle (lots of agitation) with abrupt temperature changes (hot wash followed by cold rinse, or vice versa).  Unless the item is massive, it probably makes more sense to toss your felting in with a compatible load (or loads!) you were planning to run anyway. 

Some people prefer to run the item through the washer in a mesh bag or a pillow case. This does help catch the fibers from the wool, but has the downside that the fibers may be re-deposited on the surface of the item. Nevertheless, if your machine is elderly or likely to get clogged from a particularly wooly project, a bag is probably a good idea. 

If you are using a method where you can't get at the item during the felting process (the item is in a pillow case or a mesh bag, or if you are using a front loader which can't be stopped) you might want to consider stuffing the project loosely with a small rag.  This helps keep the item from folding over on itself inside the bag or during the spin cycle: folding can leave crease marks. For small items, a loose stuffing can also help prevent the item from starting to felt to itself.

Yet another trick: a toilet plunger

A toilet plunger offers yet another way to felt.  Yes, this sounds d.i.s.g.u.s.t.i.n.g, and so it would be if you used the same plunger for felting as for your toilet.  Yuk.  Don't do that. Buy a brand new toilet plunger and hide it away when you're not felting.

Fill the tub with hot water, and the bathroom sink with cold water and have at it with the plunger. This is more work that machine felting but less work than hand-felting.  Plus, unlike front-loader felting, with a toilet plunger, you can stop at any time to check the project. 

A final trick: dryer felting

You can also felt hand knits, sort of, in a dryer.  You put in the wet item (turn it inside out) and the dryer does the temperature change and agitation part.  The upside of this is that you can stop the dryer at any time and have a look, the downside is that it often takes multiple wetting/drying cycles to get a moderate amount of felting:  the temperature change is gradual, and the agitation less than if the item were in water. This will eventually work, but it's slow, and even slower if you put it into a bag or pillow case. 

Washing felted items

Just because something is felted doesn't mean it won't shrink if you wash it again.  The upside is that if the item is still too big, you can re-felt it.  But if you'd like the felted item to retain its size, wash it the same way you would wash all woolens: cool water, no agitation, no temperature shocks, and no dryer. On the other hand, felt doesn't really seem to get very dirty--to my recollection, I've never actually had to wash a pair of felted mittens.

Embroidery

There is something about felted wool which pairs well with embroidery.  Below are some "alien eyeball" mittens (also much worn) which were embroidered after felting with a sharp needle and woolen (called "tapestry") yarn.  Although there are firmly-knit exceptions, like Swedish embroidered twined knitting, knitting generally doesn't play well with embroidery because the embroidery sinks into the stitches.  However, felted knitting has no such problem. 

(These are child's size large from the kid-mitt pattern, just somewhat misshapen, you know, from long wear.)

--Good knitting, TK

You have been reading TECHknitting on "felting knitting." 

My hat is too loose...

"My hat is too big!  How can I tighten it?" is a question frequently asked on community knitting boards.  Luckily, there are two good options, but today's post starts with two options which do NOT work, yet which are frequently suggested.

1)  Blocking the hat smaller  The idea behind this advice is that if you wet the hat and then block it smaller, the hat will stay that way.  It is true that thoroughly wetting a too-loose hat, then firmly yanking it lengthwise will make it both longer and narrower.  It is also true that pushing the fabric together and drying it in that scrunched-up position will make the hat look smaller. Yet, sadly, although blocking can do many magical things (such as make your knitting look more professional by evening out the stitches, or opening up lace) it cannot make things smaller.  Logic will tell you that any "smallerizing" you were able to achieve by blocking will be undone as soon as you put the hat on and wear it.    Plus, blocking really works best on wool, anyway, so if your hat is made of anything else, fuggedaboudit, as they say in New York.

2) Felting the hat smaller The idea here is to shrink the hat by felting it smaller.  It is indisputably true that felting will shrink woolens. However, imho, this advice is ill-advised.  Felting is a wild and uncontrolled process which goes very very fast when it finally happens, so getting the hat to shrink "just so" would be a matter of great luck.  A too-small, too-short, too-stiff object--a sort of a felt bowl--is just as likely to be the result of the experiment.  It is true that there are commercially felted hats, and even commercially-made felted jackets, but fitted felted garments are cut out of sheets of felted knitting and then sewn together. Home-made felted clogs are a popular exception, as are felted mittens, but clogs and mittens are meant to fit loosely--it is not necessary to have them sit "just so" around one's feet or hands, as a hat must sit around one's brow.

The one almost-exception to all this occurs with superwash wool. Of course, the whole POINT of superwash wool is that it does NOT felt, yet many knitters may not realize that putting this sort of yarn into a dryer helps it regain its bounce and size--a superwash hat laid out to dry will be much bigger than one machine-dried.  So, while throwing a superwash hat into the dryer is not felting per se, it is "shrinking" through using a clothes drier--an almost exception to the don't-felt concept.

Now we come to two ideas which DO work.

1. Lining the hat  This idea is 100% guaranteed to work 100% of the time.  The idea is to make a  lining--either a full lining or a headband style lining, which does fit your head exactly as you would like.  An excellent fabric to use for this lining is polar fleece. Polar fleece is stretchy, non-itchy, comes in various weights, and best of all, it does not fray (and so, does not need to be hemmed). The lining is then sewn inside the too-large hat, easing the excess fabric of the hat to the lining, one little stitch at a time.  Because the lining was made to fit your head exactly, the resulting hat must also fit your head exactly.  There are more complete details about the process in these two posts:
Lining a hat, headband style
Lining a hat, fully-lined style

2. Elastic Sometimes, lining a hat will not work, either because of its style--a slouch-hat, for example, with no real "band" around the forehead, or because a sewn in band is not a good fit for the style of the hat--a lacy cap, for example.  For such hats, you may wish to consider thread elastic, worked into the edge for several rows or rounds.  The how-to can be found in this post on tightening up socks--scroll down a bit and you will find thread elastic discussed.

Good knitting!

This post the fourth in a series on garment correction.  The other posts in this series are:
Part 1: My sweater is too wide
Part 2: My sweater is too long, my sweater is too short
Part 3:My sweater is too tight under the arms/at the bust/chest--the magic of gussets
Part 5: My sweater slips off my shoulders
Part 6 (still to come): My sweater is too small around my middle



--TK
You have been reading TECHknitting blog on "my hat is too big!"

Felted Mitten Tutorial in Knitcircus e-Magazine

The new issue of Knitcircus e-magazine is out, and contains a tutorial by TECHknitter (hey, that's me!) for making felted mittens, as part of the fall pattern collection.

Here's the link.

These kids' mittens are very easy to make--very forgiving of mistakes. Although made by hand, these are actually superior in performance and durability to high-tech winter fabrics. The "alien eyeball" pair you see with purple cuffs are quite used: they were worn as the only hand-coverings for two entire winters by an active boy, here in the frozen north of Wisconsin before being photographed! Now outgrown, they are still good for further wear by another, smaller child.

There's just one little error in the pattern presentation: The e-magazine (which contains a sort of a catalog for the pattern download) indicates that the mittens are made with Blue Sky Alpaca, but they are not. The actual pattern in the download correctly identifies the mittens as being made with either Ella Rae Classic/Ella Rae Superwash worsted-weight yarns or Dalegarn Hielo /Falk DK weight yarns.

--TK

Avoiding "nipple in the middle:" some tricks to improve hat tops, glove fingertips and motif centers

You may be knitting a pattern starts or ends in the middle, and you may find that the very center stitches are humping themselves up into an unattractive stitch-nipple, a "knipple" as Adri has cleverly named it in the comments. 


One common example is the top of a bottom-up hat. The instructions will often tell you to stop when 8 (10? 12?) stitches remain on your needles, then draw the running yarn though these last remaining stitches. Other common examples include the fingertips of gloves, the tops of mittens and the centers of knitted motifs knitted from the edge to the center. When you thread the running yarn onto a sewing needle and draw the yarn through the last round of stitches remaining, these last few stitches look sloppy--they form an elongated nipple of stitches. This is bad enough on a 3-d object like a hat top, but is a truly sad way to finish off a flat motif (hexagon, square, circle).

This same sort of nipple-in-the-middle can form when starting in the middle: a top-down hat, a hexagon or octagon motif for a patchwork blanket, or a shawl or blanket knitted in the round.

Below are several tricks to avoid this problem, worked both top-down and bottom-up. If you already HAVE this problem, this post ends a couple of tricks to get rid of the nipple, even after the project is finished.

AVOIDING AN ENDING KNIPPLE

Trick 1: Stop one round sooner

In this trick, instead of working to, say, 8 stitches on a hat top or motif center, you'd stop one round (and one set of decreases) sooner, when, say, 16 stitches remain. Drawing the running yarn up through the larger number of stitches helps prevent a nipple because the stitches have to stretch further to the middle, thus flattening them. However, if you draw the yarn through this final round too tightly, you may end up with the opposite problem: a pucker instead of a nipple. Therefore, adjust the tension with a mild hand.

Trick 2: Kitchener stitch (aka grafting)

Instead of drawing up the running yarn through the final few stitches, you can Kitchener stitch (graft) the last few stitches together. This makes a flat join instead of a rosette, and finishes a circularly-knit object with a pleasant oval center. This is the classic ending to sock toes, and one of the ideas behind the "truly flat hat top," but this idea also works with very well for glove fingers and mitten tops.

Trick 3: Smaller needles

Knit the last few rounds with a smaller needle, then finish off by drawing the tail end through the last few stitches. This trick simply puts less yarn in the middle, so there is less yarn to pouf up.

Trick 4: Do not wind the yarn around more than once to hide the tail

Recently, while experimenting with new tricks for gloves, it came to me that glove fingers need a different ending technique than that I had been using for hats. When ending hats it has been my habit to draw the yarn through the center stitches not just once, but to continue around the circle again maybe two or three more times, in order to hide the tail end. While this is a simple solution to hiding the tail, the downside is that all this extra yarn makes quite a hard knot: a knot which might look unattractively nipple-y and, when worked on gloves, is quite annoying to the sensitive fingertips. Even for hats, I believe I will avoid winding around in the future.

The simple fix is to go around with the tail once, plus ONE extra stitch to avoid any gap, and then to skim in the end elsewhere, so as NOT go around again and again through the center rosette of stitches. For glove fingers, this works particularly well when combined with working the entire fingertip on a smaller needle to yield smaller, firmer stitches: the resulting thinner fabric allows greater dexterity when wearing gloves.

AVOIDING A STARTING KNIPPLE

Trick 1: The disappearing loop cast on

There are several ways to start from the center out. The famous "Emily Ocker's" cast-on, of which you may have heard, actually results in quite a bulky set of center stitches PLUS hard little knots. I prefer the knot-less disappearing loop cast on. Disappearing loop is particularly effective when combined with the previous trick of using smaller needles. In other words, if the disappearing loop cast-on, as well as the first few rounds of the knitting are all worked on smaller needles, the amount of yarn available for nippling-out out in the middle is markedly reduced.

Trick 2: The umbilical cord cast on
The umbilical cord cast on is a waste-yarn method. A small tube is knit in waste yarn and the item being knit is started at the bottom end of this tube. Working a waste-yarn umbilical cord means your first garment stitches are more likely to exhibit even tension, which helps eliminate the nippling effect--firm tight stitches are less likely to nipple up than loose or uneven ones. Like the disappearing loop cast on, the umbilical cord cast on can be started on smaller needles to reduce the amount of yarn in the middle of the work.

FIXING THE PROBLEM AFTER THE FACT

Trick 1: Unpick and draw through

A few years ago, after one of my kids lost a winter hat for the nth time, I was looking over some old hats to get through the rest of the winter, and found one I'd knit years ago. This old-timer featured nipple-in-the-middle. The kid refused to wear such an object, so the fix went like this: In the first round of this top-down hat, I snipped a single stitch, unpicked and unraveled the yarn and caught the live loops on a thin set of dpn's. Once the live loops were securely caught onto the dpn's, I re-finished the center as if the hat had been knit from the edge-in. In other words, the fix was to run the unpicked and unraveled end through the live stitches. In principle, this is the same idea as snipping a stitch and unpicking a row to get live loops on the needle, on the way to changing the length of a garment. Another, slightly different way of conceptualizing this trick is that you are treating the first round as a waste-yarn provisional cast on.

Variations: Now, it may happen than when you snip and unpick, the resulting tail is simply not long enough to draw through the live loops. This is most likely to happen when the end has been worked in and snipped off before discovering the nipple problem. It would, of course, be difficult to firmly splice in additional yarn so close to the end. Luckily, however, there are three good solutions to this problem.

First, the classic solution of hand-sewers when faced with a too-short end is to insert the needle into the fabric most of the way and THEN thread it with the too-short end.This trick can be adapted to the top of a hat: insert the needle into perhaps three or four of the top (ending) stitches, until only the eye of the needle remains exposed, and then thread the exposed eye with the short end. As the needle is drawn through, the short end, will, of course, pop loose of the needle, but not before it has been worked through the few stitches into which the needle was inserted before threading. The needle is then re-inserted through the next several stitches, then re-threaded and the process repeated until the short end has been worked through all the live stitches PLUS one (to avoid a gap). The needle is then skimmed in through some stitches on the inside of the garment, the tail threaded on one last time, and the needle drawn through, losing the end of the short tail in the woolly loops in the back of the fabric and thus skimming it in.

The second solution to a too-short end is unravel enough extra stitches so that the tail IS long enough to thread onto a needle, and then draw the tail through these stitches, adjusting the tension so that a small attractive hole is created in the center of the work. In other words, when you unpick/unravel enough stitches so that the tail is long enough to thread onto a needle and draw through, you may find that you have so many live stitches that it would create a pucker if you were to draw the tail through tightly. Therefore, instead of drawing the tail through tightly, adjust the tension so that the tail draws the live stitches together into a neat rosette framing a small hole.

While a small hole looks very well in the middle of flat-knitted motifs such as blanket squares, it may not look so well in the middle of a hat. You can, obviously, cover the hole with a pom-pom or a tassel of one sort or another, but a third, more structural alternative is to unravel even more stitches, until your end is long enough to Kitchener-stitch with, and then Kitchener stitch shut the opening, making a fine oval ending to the formerly nipple-y hat. Alternatively, once you've ripped back far enough to yield enough yarn for a splice, you could do a Russian join or a back join (or a felted join or an overcast join or an overlap join) then proceed as though ending a hat instead of starting one.

Trick 2: Draw through without even bothering to unpick

A different situation with nipple-in-the-middle happened when I knit a cotton bag. Although started with the usually-reliable disappearing loop cast on, the stiff cotton did not squish together as wool would have, and the result was a nasty bump. As it happened, this bag was to be lined, so the inside of the bag would be my secret alone. Being fairly lazy, my fix was to simply thread a needle with a strand of the cotton yarn, locate the third round in, then draw the yarn through those stitches from the inside. Below is a photo of the outside, after the fix.


In other words, the stitches of the third row in were simply drawn up with a single strand of cotton yarn without even bothering to unpick them. This trick pooched up the nipple to the inside where it would never show (photo below) while tightening up the outside into true respectability (photo above).

This trick would obviously not work on a glove finger, but for utility knitting such as a cotton bag, it was an effective solution with no snipping involved, and an elapsed time of perhaps 30 seconds.

Photo credits: Barry Toranto.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

--TK
You have been reading TECHknitting "eliminating nipple in the middle from knitwear: get rid of the bump"