More of the same

Or at least almost the same. The mail man made my day on Friday, and brought me a new book:
Now what else am I supposed to do, but try it out right away? I love this book and all the dozens of mittens in it. My favorite one right away was the black and white one on the cover:

So after a visit to the LYS, off to work I go. I had to start over a couple of times, as working the fringe wasn't quite a piece of cake. But I finally got the hang of it, and used a couple of circulars as a sort of a life line (it's really easy to pull the loops out as you're working the next round after creating the fringe.) I had to modify the main pattern quite a bit to fit it to my gauge -49 stitches across would have made a giant mitten, and I don't think I know any ladies with hands that big... I also switched the border patterns to other ones in the book. Here's where I'm at so far (the red line is the place for the thumb):


And a detail of the cuff:

Even though I love the book, it's not exactly very easy to work with. Most mittens don't have a full pattern in there, only charts for the stitch patterns. There are a few general mitten instructions for the different types, and you have to figure out which one to use, or possibly a combination of two. I'm ok with that, since I'm used to picking up parts or ideas from patterns and combining them, but this is by no means a book for a beginner.

I also whish they would have used some other method of binding, because the back pages already look like this after only a couple of days of use:


(This has nothing to do with the fact that my little helper helped me wash the book with the garden hose -it was like this before that. Really!)