Brimstone Butterfly Fingerless Mitts

A couple of years ago I was out one fine spring day chasing spring signs with my camera and managed to capture a Brimstone butterfly feeding from a coltsfoot. Both the butterfly and the coltsfoot are early spring signs here in Sweden. When you spot them you know it’s the end of several long and dark months.

I love the colour settings in the picture and have been looking for a way to turn this into a knitting project for quite a while. Finally I decided to dye my own Madelinetosh skein to match up the lemon yellow and light mint green. I settled for fingerless mitts, which are in fact a most useful accessory in the spring.

The pattern is made up of mixed knits and purls. There’s just a few cables. The tricky part might be to embroider the butterfly on at the end, but since I’m myself a beginner when it comes to embroidery it shouldn’t be too hard.

Materials needed
Darning needle for embroidering the butterfly & the petals
Scrap yarn for provisional cast on for the thumb

Measurements
After blocking, my yellow mitts were:

20 cm (8 inches) from cuff edge to bind off.
9 cm (3.5 inches) from thumb gusset increase to bind off.
20 cm (8 inches) in circumference (in the middle).

After blocking, my blue mitts were:

18 cm (7 inches) from cuff edge to bind off.
9 cm (3.5 inches) from thumb gusset increase to bind off.
20 cm (8 inches) in circumference (in the middle).

The choice of yarn in both versions are very stretchy, which gives a nice fit and are quite forgiving when it comes to size.

Skills
Open cast on - I use an open cast on (provisional cast on) with scrap yarn for the thumb. See instruction here: http://knitty.com/ISSUEfall05/FEATfall05TT.html

Embroidery stitches - for the petals I’ve used straight embroidery stitches and for the butterfly I’ve used chain embroidery stitches. There are many tutorials online for these stitches, but at the end of this pattern I will show how to do the chain stitches.

Variation suggested
If you want to skip the embroidery you can easily allow part of the ribbing (3 knits) to bend away from the thumb gusset increase with the other rib columns, and skip the cables and the seed stitches (in rounds 38 through 57).