Christmas Finale!

As you may recall, last Christmas I gave my family gift cards for knitted objects. I managed to finish my mom and Jen’s hats, my auntie’s mittens, and, yesterday, just before the year-long deadline, I finished Angie’s mittens.

She requested black/grey mittens with some holly on the backs. Despite my experience with cross stitch, I am no embroiderer, so these mittens sat  in a very finished state for a long time in the bottom of the project bag as I contemplated *how* I was going to add the holly.

Last night, as I was relistening to season 4 of the Walking Dead (and trying to avoid *seeing* all of the gore . . .) I finally broke out the mittens for their finishing. I decided on some duplicate stitch as a means of adding the embellishments and was, in the end, supper happy to have had an occasion to try out this technique.

While the mittens are far from perfect, the duplicate stitch was quite fun. Granted, it would have been easier on a flat object, rather than a 3D object . . . but I only caught the yarn once or twice and did not sew the front of the mitten to the back of the mitten. In other words, no real tragedies occurred in the finishing of these mittens. As you can also see, I decided to go with holly on one hand and some cute little red berries/hearts on the other. This was my husband’s idea: he figured it would be pretty difficult to replicate the holly without a pattern and so, why try? He suggested going for something with a bit of contrast and fun. I’m glad I did.