Sprang is totally addictive due to two things. I can see a result almost straight away, and it is something I can do with the TV in the background our talking to someone. So of course I couldn't keep myself from testing more things. I set up a warp for a male hairnet of 44 loops and 35 cm in length. Carol James had a suggestin for 44 loops and 30 cm for a 16th century male bonnet, since my husband has a really large head I increased it to 35 cm. I made what she calls the "double grid" stitch, that is also called "holes all over" in my book about sprang. It was a fairly easy way of working, the hardest thing was to remember which part of the cycle I was in, the pattern consists of a cycle of four rows. I did miss in at least one place and got a row with double sized holes in it.
But I couldn't wait for the yarn to arrive, especially when I found that I actually had two colours of yarn that I hadn't used, but now I have gone through my whole limited yarn stash. In the book by Tine Abrahamsson there was a pattern to make mittens which didn't seem to be too complicated, if I skipped the diagonal geometric pattern in them. The pattern called for 22+16+22 loops, I increased that to 28+20+28, since I thought my yarn was thinner than the one in the pattner, but most of the measurements in length was made by siimply holding up my hands to see if it looked about the same size.
The warp consists of three indivdual warps, that you will join together after a while. Two longer ones, that will be the hand of the mitten, and one shorter part in the middle that will be thumb.. I also decided to try making horizontally stripes. As usual it took me longer to actually set up the warp than to get going. I worked the basic intertwining stitch all the way. It was a bit tricky to start, where you have to sort the two different yarns so that you separate one colour for upper and one colour for the lower thread.
After having worked the three warps separately they were joined together, with a row starting with picking up two threads at the start. It worked fine, but after having finished it was clear that there were quite loose loops at the joining of the warps, and that after having joined the warps together my overall tension got looser. I worked as far down as I could, with the last few rows being taken in by treating two threads as one, and starting with either two or four threads. I would have liked to make the mittens longer, but my frame is too short for that.
This was the finished pieces after blocking. The bottom was ended with a fringe, and the tops were chained together. I also found that it was a lot easier to chain when I first put a safety line through the top and took them off the sticks to chain them. It's also obvious that the bottom part of the weave has gotten larger, also probably having to do with difference in tension and that it's easier to pack the top part tighter than the lower one.
When you fold tie piece in half you get a mitten with a thumb. The sides were whipped together and the rest of the threads were weaved into the whipped seam. For the larger mitten I felt it was too big, so I took it in by making a dart and closing it by weaving a thread through the weave. It got a bit clumpsy on the inside, but looked a lot better on the outside.
The finished pair of open mittens. This was a project where I learnt to make stripes, adding width and taking in width but also to make a fringed endings. I would have preferred to make them longer, I love wearing cuff warmers since my wrists do get cold, but for that to work with my short frame I would need to make them shorter, probably starting by the thumb instead a covering the fingers. Or I need to find a way to make a bigger fram.
All in all it took me one day to make the mittens, so I think they are nice projects to start learning new techniques and maybe even patterns, if I make more cuff warmers then I acutally get something I can use, instead of making an endless supply of hairnets that I only use in historical recreations.
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