Spent some time during the week last week going through as much of the pattern as possible, because I calculated how long it'd take for me to finish this project and it was Not Great, so I needed to make some extra progress. I got down to 1 row needing about 6-8 minutes (while listening to some very fast music) which was blazingly fast compared to when I started! and it's somewhat even save for some laddering, hoping it blocks out better. It is also...extremely small for my hand, so I have not tried wiggling my hand into it since. 

Done with the body of the mitten now. Picked up the stitches on the thumb hopefully correctly (first time picking up stitches, but I couldn't figure out what direction to arrange the needles/stitches so that I'd be knitting in the correct direction. Uh...hopefully all that works out...

Powered through the ribbing, did the cuff footprint patterrn...and then sort of realised I'd been tensioning too tight, so ripped out and reknitted half of those, realised I got the pattern wrong, and tinked back a few rows. I'm ok...I'm ok...

Anyway, I'm making some progress through the pattern (currently finished 12 rows out of 62 in the main chart). I don't know if I carried the unused yarn over the thumb hole correctly but I guess I will find out when I have to pick up the stitches ! What I've made so far is too small for my hands but it's for a friend with small hands (and my hands are large I think) - my bigger concern here is that the tension isn't right and I might be knitting a bit too tightly because I can't quite control my colourwork tension yet. Some of the stitches are kind of uneven/awkward-looking but I'm hoping that blocking will help with those. If I'm being honest I would probably have sworn off colourwork already if not for the fact that a lot of the patterns I have bookmarked are colourwork patterns...so I want to get good at it.

Also initially I did both strands tensioned with my left hand (continental) but kept having to readjust and do some really weird twisting, which was taking time and I think made the floats tighter, so here was where I learnt to do English knitting. I'm still very awkward at it and it's caused a few stitches to pop off the needles, but I think I'm getting faster and it feels less impossible to manipulate now. The floats from this look a lot nicer/regular too. 

I originally intended to do this double-knitted, but realised..........I do not have the brain cells to do the ribbing and especially not for 30 rows working for almost the first time on 2.5mm needles. So I'm just going to do it normally, and if need be I can sew in a lining for extra warmth/padding (as the recipient has smallish hands). 

The ribbing is going slowly because ktbl is...quite annoying...it DOES look better than k1p1 rib but WOW I started this worrying about if I'd be able to do the charts and colourwork correctly and I am still slowly doing the rib. AND I have to do a second mitten... 😂 It will be worth it...