I’ve been playing around for a while with knitting cable circles and filling them with embroidered spots of colour. Over Christmas, I handknitted myself an aran-weight jumper with a yoke covered in cable circles filled with old gold spots, making up the pattern on the hoof. It reminds my husband of an early, low budget Star Trek costume and reminds me of gold coins in undersea treasure- here's a photo to decide for yourself.
Anyway, going with the treasure theme, I thought it would be fun to scale the pattern down to a finer yarn and use jewel colours for the spots, to give the impression of gems in fine, twisting metalwork. The mitts are mostly speedy mock cable, with just the circles worked with a cable needle. My embroidery is usually a little rustic (i.e. a tiny bit messy) but the method I use here for embroidering neat, round circles is pretty fool proof- you just embroider an asterisk with an odd number of arms and then weave under and over the arms, spiralling from the centre out until the arms are full.
I knitted these Gemstone Mitts in Fyberspates Vivacious 4-ply, which has some lovely gold, copper, silvery and verdigris colours for picking up the metalwork theme. I think the spots look nicest embroidered in yarn that is finer than the knitting yarn, but anything up to 4-ply works. I used Fyberspates Gleem silk/BFL laceweight for my spots and Fyberspates have just released this same yarn on little cards of embroidery thread that would be perfect for this (I know this is starting to sound like product promotion but I promise it’s not- I just have a large and lovely Fyberspates Vivacious/Gleem stash for my knitwear business). The spots would be great embroidered from stash or even using colourfast, washable embroidery threads.
If you would like to knit these, you can find my free Gemstone Mitts pattern on my hand knitting patterns page or on Ravelry.
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