Good Time Mitts, Part I: Some trial and lots of error

I have an inexplicable semi-obsession with mitts.  Fingerless gloves, I guess.  I don't know what my deal is, but there you go.

I spent I don't know how many lunch hours surfing Ravelry's pattern archives and finally settled on Melissa Woods' Good Time Mitts, because they were supposed to be pretty easy to do and I liked the really plain, no-gimmicks, style.  They don't even have designated hands.

Of course, I had to make life hard for myself: The first one I did, I also threw in a stranded pattern.  That worked reasonably well until I had to make a left mitt and realized I didn't have a good handle on where to start and end the pattern.  I got it wrong and the increases got in the way, and it was all a great, big, mess.  Ordinarily, I'm pretty good at spatial stuff like that, but sometimes that part of my brain goes out for coffee or something.  Two days ago, I was completely unable to figure out at what point of the mitt to anchor a stranding pattern.  I counted, I drew charts (plural), I even knitted a test mitt out of terrible yarn so I could place markers as I went to see where stuff should go.

It was the worst mitt ever.  I dropped a stitch (the paperclip is holding it up, like a toggle), forgot to use the stretchy bind-off around the fingers, lost count of my increases, the wrist is baggy because I didn't count rows carefully at all, and there are some almost-holes where the terrible yarn wasn't spun evenly.  We won't even talk about the job I did picking up stitches for the thumb.  Hole-o-rama, folks.

Today, of course, it's perfectly obvious just by looking at where the increases are for the thumb where the pattern should be anchored.  Luckily, these knit up ridiculously fast so I didn't waste a lot of time knitting that test mitt.

For the record, it's about three stitches to either side of the beginning, by the way.  Left or right of it depending on which-handed mitt you're making.  This is easy on a right mitt but takes a little more planning on a left, since you're anchoring it at the far end of the pattern rather than at the beginning.  I'm sure I could knit the whole thing in reverse, too, but I'll have to wait until my spatial brain comes back from wherever it went this afternoon to figure that one out.

Spatial fails aside, I love this pattern.  It's super easy and incredibly fast.  I could probably do two pairs a day if I had all day, and I'm the slowest knitter ever.  Maybe more than two pairs.  I should find out sometime.  It's also easy to adapt--the first "real" pair I'm making with longer ribbing that comes up to the heel of my hand (fewer rows of stockinette between ribbing and thumb increases).  I have weird, low-set, thumbs so the increases didn't hit quite right and the thumb as-written was set on too high, but it's easy to fix that because the pattern is so simple.