One of the most complimented clothing items that I own is a prized pair of mittens I picked up at the end of a pier in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These bad boys, featured prominently in the bad ass photo below, occasion comment from strangers nearly every time I wear them.

A few months ago, my boyfriend’s friend was in San Francisco visiting and gushed over the mittens. Having recently taken up knitting again two years ago I said to myself, “Self, now is the time to recreate the lobster mittens”. And here you have it folks, the lobster mittens replica.

I’m pretty pleased with how they came out! And they’re my first intarsia pattern that actually worked! You can find the pattern for the lobster intarsia for free at the end of the blog. I knit this on worsted weight yarn using off-white, red and a wee bit of black (just for the eyes) and I think I was on about a US7 needle.

Now, here’s the place I’d love to be able to write out an amazing tutorial for producing the perfect intarsia. Only problem….I don’t actually know how to do them properly, I just kinda made it up. There are plenty of good tutorials online to help you though. I did come up with a couple tips while doing this one though.

1. It’s way easier to do intarsia neatly if you’re not knitting in the round. I normally do mittens on double-pointed needles but to make these mittens I opened the pattern up then sewed a seam down one side to connect front to back on the mittens at the end.

2. I found it easiest to have three balls of yarn going when knitting the lobster; two balls of the off-white and one of the red. I would knit to the lobster, drop the first off-white and switch to the red. Then I’d knit the lobster section of the pattern, and when I hit the edge, switch to the second ball of off-white. What this did was kept me from having to carry yarn along the back of mitten. Last time I tried to do that, I didn’t keep proper tension and the adorable toque featuring copulating deer that I had made was way too small for the intended recipient with no stretch at all.

Please don’t reproduce this pattern on your website. If you’d like to feature this pattern, please link back to this blog post. Thanks!

Sorry it is not more of a tutorial, but I feel there are many more qualified on the web than I on this particular subject. I’m not sure how to post a link to a downloadable .pdf file for the pattern, so you’ll just have to go off this until I figure it out.

So that’s it folks! Go forth and knit!