emergency mittens

The weather bureau did a good job this week, and correctly predicted snowfalls.  Here’s what I saw when I stuck my head out the kitchen window this morning:

I haven’t been this excited for such a long time!  I’ve never actually been out in falling snow before, so you can imagine my childlike squeals of delight.

London being what it is, and completely unable to cope with ‘adverse weather conditions’, the city has ground to a complete halt today.  I had no realistic chance of getting to work, and my flatmate is working from home, so we agreed to head out in the snow and she’d let me run around like a five year old, all bouncy and giggly.

One problem: despite being a knitter, I don’t own a single pair of gloves or mittens.  My last pair of gloves got left at a train station last winter, and I refused to buy another pair on principle, but hadn’t made the effort to knit a replacement.

Some time in the deep, dark, distant knitting past, before I even knew how to knit on DPNs, I started a pair of vintage mittens with cable ribs (Rav link), knit on two needles.  They’re not much fun to knit, and not very interesting to look at, so they have been lurking in the UFO pile ever since.

However I decided that several inches of snow is enough necessitate some emergency knitting, so the mitts have been resurrected.  I finished off the second one this morning, sewed up the seams (very badly) and off we went.  Sadly the intervening years have altered the gauge somewhat, so one mitten fits perfectly whilst the other flops around a bit.  But that wasn’t going to stop me playing in snow!

It’s snowed consistently all day, so we had great fun messing about in the park behind our house:

The snow was all light and fluffy, like swishing through clouds.  Just as lovely as I’d hoped!

As for the emergency mittens?  Plain, simple, and not very photogenic, but successful in stopping my fingers from falling off.