I have had the most fun learning to knit these modular sideways hand warmers.  The pattern, called Either/Or, is a great one.  It’s by Lee Meredith, and she includes instructions for making short fingerless gloves, long fingerless gloves and mittens.   The pattern is very thorough.  There is a little bit of calculating in order to keep track of the stitches cast on for when you knit the second glove.  This is where I went wrong.

First, I think these gloves are so pretty.  I started knitting in the round with the thumb.  You have to do lots of increasing, and this was kind of funny to me to try to keep up with.

I didn’t have enough colors so I had to use some yarn markers as well (blue and pink).  The markers indicated where I was doing the increases.  All the markers overwhelmed me a little at first, but then I realized it was no big thing.

Once I increased to a certain point, I put part of the stitches on markers and then knit the top.  When I was done with the top, I came back to the stitches on the bottom and knitted the bottom.  Although – these mitts are so fun.  They fit so that the top can be the bottom or the bottom can be the top.  Either works.

So back to how I went wrong:

I knit the first mitt and then I got distracted by another project.  I left these mitts for a week or so.  When I returned to the second mitt, I somehow didn’t do my calculations correctly, and I ended up with this:

Two different sized mitts.  I am not sure how I did this.  I was disappointed though.  I’d hoped to give these as a gift, but I will have to make some more. Making more is not a bad thing, but I wish I would have knitted them one after the other.  I need to resolve to do better in project finishing.  For example, I was looking around at my projects on ravelry today, and I found a sock that I had made in 2010.  I realized that the second one still needs to be made.

So now having realized my finishing problems, I realize that I’ve got to get back to these gnome mittens.  The first one is almost done.  I don’t want the gnome mittens to become another unfinished statistic.