Fisherman's Mitts

 I am now elbows deep in 2020 Christmas gifts (luckily we won't be celebrating with my family 'til mid January so I have a couple extra weeks to finish theirs up!). These are a pair of convertible mittens I'm making for my older brother, who is planning on spending an indefinite amount of time traveling the country in a small camper in the coming year. I figured for the winter as he helps out on our parents homestead and for the spring/cool evenings living in the trailer, a pair of mittens with a flap that can either cover his fingers for warmth or fold back to give him control of his fingers when he needs it would be a practical and useful gift.

I struggled to find one pattern that met exactly what I envisioned making for him so I'm doing a fair amount of improvising, based off a few patterns I found as the starting point. I started with some brown fisherman's wool (leftover from making his hat last year, so he'll have a matching set 😜), cast on 36 stitches onto a set of 2.75mm DPNs, and doing 1x1 ribbing for about 20 rows. Repeat the same with the other end of the yarn ball on another set of DPNs for the second mitten. Then I switched to 3.25mm needles and now I'm increasing for the thumb gusset. When I get to the thumb, I want that to have its own flap that folds back to either cover or reveal the thumb, separate from the fingers. I found very few patterns with this feature, but the cool thing about making stuff yourself is you can adapt them as you go to be practical for your own needs/desires! So I'll be improvising that step when I get to it.