All About the Tessellate Mitts Pattern

Back in 2020 I was thinking about how I could use sets of five mini skeins for a design. I always have trouble finding patterns for sets of mini skeins, as I want to knit something which will show off all of the colours together, rather than them being lost in a larger project. I got the idea for these mitts and thought they would be an ideal way to use these sets, so I sketched them in a notebook to revisit at a later time. I tend to have very cold hands and in January was struggling with my hands cramping from how cold they were getting, which reminded me of the sketch I'd done of these mitts, so after the Celestial Cowl pattern launched I started working on them.

The first thing I needed to decide on was sizing. I'd noticed a lot of mitt patterns are one size only, but I decided early on in the process that I wanted to offer multiple sizes, as I know how frustrating it is to find a pattern you like and discover it's not available in your size. I spent some time studying size charts and decided to offer three sizes, which would cover the standard sizes from women's small to men's large. I wanted the mitts to fit with either zero ease or some positive ease, this means that if you're between sizes you can just knit the bigger size and still get a good fit. My hands are half an inch smaller than the smallest size and I find that the smallest size fits me comfortably.

I hadn't designed a pattern in multiple sizes before, and designing mitts seemed like a good smaller project to use to learn how to properly grade a pattern. I eventually want to design jumpers with a range of sizes, so thought mitts would be the perfect way to start small before progressing on to that. It was essential that I ensured all sizes would fit perfectly, therefore after deciding the measurements for each size I wrote a basic mitt pattern without any colourwork and knitted a prototype for each size. I then had family and friends try out the prototypes in order to provide me with feedback on the fit, so that I could make sure the sizing had been calculated correctly. Thankfully the prototypes had no issues, which confirmed I'd worked out the sizes accurately.

I was now able to start working on the final design using the pattern I'd written for the mitt prototypes, my original sketches and swatches I'd knitted. I sketched some chart ideas on graph paper and created a number of different versions before deciding on the final chart. I then wrote the first draft of the final pattern, which I followed to knit the mitts using a grey set of mini skeins from Down Sheepy Lane.

The contrast between the colours in the mitts turned out to be more subtle than I'd envisioned. In retrospect, there wasn't a huge amount of contrast between the mini skeins so I should've expected the result. Whilst I liked how the subtle colours looked, I decided that for the main pattern sample I wanted more of a contrast. I opted to use a brighter set of mini skeins from Botanical Yarn, which worked well for the higher contrast version of the mitts.

I'm really happy with the final pattern and it's made me excited to buy more sets of mini skeins to try. I think I'll also be looking through my stash at different combinations of scraps I could put together. I've had a lot of different ideas for future mitt patterns whilst working on these, so I'm sure I'll be designing more mitts in future!

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