All About the Celestial Mitts Pattern

The Celestial Cowl is definitely one of my favourite designs, it was the second pattern I released and I still feel very proud of it. Earlier this year I released the Tessellate Mitts which got me thinking about other mitt design ideas, as I find them very practical to wear during the colder months. I ended up having the idea to design these mitts to accompany the Celestial cowl, as I thought the motif would translate nicely onto a pair of mitts.

I knitted a few different swatches and made a start on writing the first draft of the pattern. When designing patterns which will be in multiple sizes I like to write the pattern before I knit my sample, so I can ensure the maths all works out and the design works well across the sizes. For these mitts I chose to offer three sizes, (similar to the Tessellate Mitts) covering the standard sizes from women's small to men's large.

One of the biggest challenges I faced with this pattern was deciding on how I was going to write the instructions for the thumb. I knew I wanted the pattern to continue across the thumb, so I was going to need colourwork charts for both the hand and the thumb. Originally I was going to use the same charts across all sizes, with the smaller sizes stopping working from the charts at earlier points. However, as the thumb starts on a different row on each size, I realised this would mean the charts wouldn't line up perfectly across the sizes. I decided it would be best to have a separate hand and thumb chart for each size; this allowed me to evenly distribute the density of the stars across the hand section for each size and line the thumb charts up perfectly with the hand colourwork.

I used the same yarn for this pattern as I'd used for the Celestial Cowl. Both colours are a fingering weight yarn from Beehive Yarns. The main colour is 'Lady Midnight', which is a navy blue with gold stellina and the contrast colour is 'Carmelita', a variegated yarn with tones of gold, brown and grey. I love how these two colourways look together, so was very happy to be knitting with them again.

The mitts turned out exactly as I'd pictured them and I love how they look either worn on their own or with the Celestial Cowl. I also think they would look great with some different colour combinations, as the speckles don't necessarily have to be stars. I found them to be quite quick to knit, I managed to nearly finish one of them in a day and I'm not a particularly speedy knitter - I won't be surprised if I end up knitting myself another pair of these mitts!

Click the link below to check out the full details of the pattern.