All About the Flower Bed Mitts Pattern

I'd been thinking about this design idea for well over a year before I began working on it. I knew I wanted to create some mitts with colourwork flowers all over them, so in early December I decided to finally sit down and start designing the flowers. I used knitting chart software to experiment with different flower ideas, as I find that using this software is the quickest way to try different colourwork ideas. I then used my grid paper notebook to manually draw any flowers I particularly liked and wanted to use in the final design.

The next step in the design process was to knit a swatch to figure out my gauge for the project. I put together a very rough first draft of a floral colourwork chart to use for the gauge swatch. Once my swatch was blocked and I'd measured my gauge I was ready to get started on the maths side of the pattern. I created blank charts for each size and completed a first draft of the written instructions.

I was then ready to start working on the final charts. I started with the smallest size and spent quite a lot of time arranging the different flower designs around the mitt, trying to get a good distribution of flowers in different sizes. At one point I was really struggling to get the chart right; I put the project away and came back to it the next day to make a fresh attempt. Thankfully this worked well and I managed to finish the chart for the smallest size and was really pleased with it. I then copied this over to the centre of the chart for the next size up, and extended some of the flowers around the edges which are cut off in the smallest size. I added some new flowers around the edges to fill up any blank spaces, as I wanted to retain the look of the first chart. This process was then repeated for the final size, and I spent some time making little adjustments until I was really happy with the finished charts for all sizes.

It was then time to get started with knitting the mitts. I'd already decided I wanted to use some Spectrum Fibre yarn from my stash, as I thought the vibrant colourways would be great for these mitts. I decided to use 'Origami' as the main colour (for the background) and was originally using 'Potion' as the contrast colour, which is a variegated yarn consisting mainly of pinks and purples. I began knitting the first mitt and was a little bit unsure about whether the colours had enough contrast. After I was about halfway through the mitt I was noticing that due to the speckles in both colourways, some of the lines in the design weren't very clear - making a lot of the smaller flowers difficult to see. I decided to take another look through my stash to see if I had any other more solid colours which could work better. I discovered a partial skein of 'Teal' (also from Spectrum Fibre). I'd already used some of this yarn for a shawl project, but was pretty certain I still had plenty left for the mitts. I unravelled the mitt I'd been working on and started again using the new contrast colour. Thankfully the new contrast colour worked really well and the finished mitts ended up having the clearly defined lines I was hoping for. I was glad I'd decided to unravel the original mitt, as it was definitely worth doing to get a better final result.

This design is one I'm really proud of, it took a lot of work to get it to a point where I was happy with it, plus at some points I didn't think it was going to work out. However, I really love the finished mitts and am so excited to finally release the pattern.

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