All the socks I’ve planned to knit for Christmas are finished but there are still several weeks left until Christmas Eve so I thought I’d knit some more things. Both kids will get a pair of mobile mittens with finger openings. I found a nice easy pattern to follow in relatively chunky yarn – Keep in touch by Drops Design.

Ingrid isn’t supposed to get any Christmas gifts at all this year, because the gaming computer she got was expensive enough to be both a birthday gift and a Christmas gift and then some. But mittens are more like a utility so those don’t really count, I think.

Oh, let’s be honest. Every gift I knit is a selfish one. The knitting is as much a gift to myself as the finished object is to whoever gets it.

Nice easy patterns are quick to make but also kind of boring to knit, so I decided to add some cables to these mittens, inspired by another design I saw in a book. Then I had the idea of doing the cables in contrasting colours and when I pictured the result in my mind it looked so much better than what I saw in the original pattern that I just had to do it this way. I’ve never done intarsia cables before, but how hard can it be.

Not very hard, it turns out, but fiddly. So my quick pairs of mittens are now not so quick any more. Every other row there is cabling to do, and in the rows between the coloured stitches have to be knitted backwards because the yarn end is at the wrong side of the coloured band. It’s not quite double the work but almost. Maybe it would have been wiser to stick to a simpler design for a last minute project like this… but I do like these a lot. I have two weeks left still so it’ll be fine.

I can knit for Ingrid right here in plain sight without her noticing anything. She’s busy with her own thoughts. If you asked her, she would probably be able to tell you that I have been knitting, but not much more.

It’s much trickier with Adrian. He is curious and sociable. He looks at my knitting, comments on the design, opines on the colours, tries it on even when he knows it’s not for him. There is no way he would not notice. So I’ll have to make his late at night when he is in bed. Or perhaps during the day when he is at school, if I can find the time.