The two Cuff Muffs in this book might just be the most eccentric and unusual patterns that I have ever worked on!

They came about while my husband and I were on a visit to Iceland, in the January of 2020, and, as you can imagine, the temperatures were VERY cold, to the level of being unlike anything I have ever experienced in my life up to that point (or since, at the time of writing this!).

Not surprisingly, my thoughts turned to keeping my hands warm, but because I was on holiday, rather than just going about my daily tasks, the importance of being able to access my phone took on a whole new significance. Not only access, but USE, and being a smartphone, for that, I’d need to be able to use my fingers.

Of course, fingerless gloves, and mitts, of various kinds exist—there are some in this very book—but I REALLY needed to be able to satisfy the dual goals of keeping the ends of my fingers warm, AND being able to access my phone’s camera function, and take that fabulous selfie, with equal ease.

Hello Cuff Muff!

This was the first of the two cuff muff designs I worked on. It has one lovely snug, close-fitting, double-knitted cuff, to keep the muff on your non-dominant hand without you having to worry about it falling off. (The muff, not your hand…)

The muff then balloons out to a much fuller shape (and thanks to the huge difference in gauge between double- knitting and DKBrioche, this is achieved without needing to change stitch count at all!), with ample room inside, for both hands to keep each other warm in the same space.

Then the double-knitted end piece, containing eyelets for feeding through the plaited cord, serves as a way of closing the bigger end of the muff, should you wish to wear it only on one hand, for a while, while the other is busy doing other things.

The open-ended nature of this ingenious project means that you can remove and replace one of your hands from the cuff muff at will.

For a completely different way of keeping warm, why not knit two of them, flip them around, and wear them as lusciously warm half-sleeves, or wind baffles, to stop those pesky, nippy, November breezes from finding their way up into the sleeves of your winter coat?

Mmmm.The cosy possibilities are legion!