How To Knit Mittens: Part 3 - calculate mitten size

Now that you have determined the gauge that your knitting with, you are ready to begin the mitten. You can either use this on yourself if you are knitting the mitten for yourself or for the person that you are knitting the mitten for. Either way this next measurement is a very important measurement and will determine the overall finished size of your mitten. You need to measure around the widest part of your hand, or the hand of the person the mitten is for not including your thumb. So for most of us this here is the widest portion of your hand. So you can take a piece of yarn or you can use a measuring tape its up to you, and wrap it around like this and figure out what that measurement is. On my hand that measurement is 8 inches. This is the time where we get to use our math and convert this information into our pattern. Because mine is 8 inches and I'm going to make the mitten to fit my own hand I need to take the number of inches around my hand multiplied by the number of stitches in my gauge and this is the number of cross not the number up and down, and that will determine how many stitches we need to cast on to begin our mitten.

On my hand because the measurement round is 8 inches, and my gauge is four stitches per inch, I would multiply eight times for a total of 32 stitches. Whatever number you come up with you need to add an additional four stitches to that number to cast on. The reason why we are adding the additional stitches is to compensate for this seam that we are going to have at the end. So for me I would need to cast on a total of 36 stitches.

Once you have completed all of your measurements you will be ready to begin. So go ahead and start by doing a slipknot again, slide it onto your needle and cast on the number of stitches you need to do. As I mentioned before I need to cast on 36 stitches in order to fit my own hand. When casting on make sure that you have an even number of stitches. So if your measurements come up with an odd number add one more or one less. But the pattern that we are using requires an even number of stitches. So just keep that in mind when you are casting on.

Once you have cast on all the stitches you will need, we will be ready to begin our pattern. We are going to learn a new pattern, we are going to learn something called ribbing and that is the part of that is stretchy down at the bottom of mittens or gloves or the bottoms of your sweaters, the part that holds it in tight. So that is what we are going to learn next, how to do ribbing.

So go ahead and cast on how many stitches you figured you'd needed. Write that down somewhere because when you get ready to do your second mitten you'll want to make sure you are using the same calculations.

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• How to knit
• calculate size of a project
• size of a mitten
• how to knit mittens