Rowr Mitts - Test Knitting - New Pattern Review

Knitting designer, Nakia Casey, had asked me to test knit her recent pattern, "Rowr Mitts" (Ravelry download here).  It's a colorwork design, using two colors of your choice, and a quite easy-to-knit technique called mosaic or slip-stitch. I hadn't tried this method before, so I was excited to see how it went, in comparison to fair isle. It's a very cool method, and if you haven't tried colorwork before, or don't like trying to figure out how to hold both yarns at the same time, then give this pattern a try.

My daughter loves anything animal print, so she instantly took to her little leopard mitts!

I spent about one day of knitting for each mitt, and made the child sized pair for my daughter. I used my Twisted Sock yarn for these, but would also suggest using my Classic Sock yarn as it's 100% merino and fluffy fibers love to "hug" each other while doing colorwork. You will end up knitting one row of the chart with only one color at a time, and slipping the opposite colored stitches. Then you repeat that same row once more, then switch to your other color, knit those stitches, while slipping the opposite colored stitches and repeating the same row again, one time. Then move to the next row of the chart, and so on. This method makes it fast and really simple to manage.

The charts themselves are quite clear and easy to follow. The pattern itself is well-written so there's no guess-work. Overall, I really loved the pattern itself, and am loving the end result! This is the perfect kind of knit if you want some instant weekend gratification, or have a gift you'd like to make, pronto. They're pretty versatile as well, because the adult pair uses 3 repeats of the chart for the wrist until you get to the thumb gusset, but you can easily knit two or even one repeat depending on how long you want them to be on your arm/wrist. I used my kettle dyed yarn, and it looks great! You can also try out a gradient yarn as the background, or the contrasting color to change the ending effect.

It's a great project for giving colorwork a go, for a fast knit, and it definitely makes a little statement of it's own! It also uses a very small amount of fingering yarn... I believe I used less than 150 yds for the kids mitts with 2 chart repeats for the wrist/arm. I know I could not have used that much, since I used the remainder from that 400yd skein to make my husbands "We call them Pirates" fair isle hat.

I think one of the reasons these mitts knit up so quickly is because the chart and pattern changes enough to be interesting, and has a really great rhythm to it so that you don't want to put it down. It's more fun to just keep knitting it until it's done.