These are both sort of quilty, because I have been pretty fixated on patchwork recently. Adapting my patchwork doodles on quad paper to knitting was an interesting challenge. The first problem is trying to make them recognizable (at least with some squinting and concentration, or once someone's pointed out the source) despite not being able to have clean diagonal lines or half- and quarter-square triangle units in which all the pieces are the same size. This shortcoming ("design feature") is clearest in the pinwheel mitten on the right, I think. You can see that the light triangles and dark triangles aren't the same size, and that the dark triangles aren't really triangles at all, they're sort of half-butterfly shapes. It still works, though.
The Ohio Star mitten on the left looks like an optical illusion to me. Each star has concentric squares in the middle, surrounded by eight light-coloured triangles; the rest is just filler so it's not necessary to strand the unused colour behind more than three stitches. I think it ends up looking like an optical illusion (focus on the stars and the checkerboard is less obvious… focus on the checkerboard and you can't see the stars).
I liked the concentric squares that make the centre of each star so much that I put a smaller, checkerboard version of them on the palm. (This also appears on the cuff of the pinwheel mitten: I am nothing if not willing to recycle my own work.)
Then I was thinking about how concentric squares change character when turned on point, and how good a mitten that would make, and before I knew it there was a pair of them.
These ones are not City Tweed—they're made out of Jamieson Soft Shetland (RIP). One pair took just a hair under two skeins, so I'm pretty pleased. The finished fabric is thick and spongy and assertively woolly.
My left thumb is pretty upset with me for knitting this many mittens in a short timeframe, so no knitting for me today—instead I have designs on this stuff.
