In the spirit of cleaning up some of my blogging todos, here are the photos and final finishing details of the fingerless mitts that I knitted in sock yarn. In my previous endpaper mitts post I was worried that the yarn would set off my dermographism. Fortunately soaking in warm water with a good shampoo softened them up a lot, although I'm still careful about not wearing them too much at any one time, just in case.

I found a good post on how to block mittens. The template plastic was easy to find in a local quilting store. You can see the template plastic poking out of the mitts in the photos.

In between working on gift knitting, I decided to at least finish one of the fingerless mittens I'm working on for me, using the endpaper mitts pattern. (Ravelry link to my project). The knitting went reasonably well, good practice for stranded knitting, but there's just one little snag.

I suffer from irritation sensitivity, sometimes called dermographism. It's a condition that a lot of children have, where irritation to the skin produces symptoms like an allergic reaction, such as hives or itchy spots. And it looks like woolen gloves, especially tight ones like these mitts, set it off. I'm going to try soaking them in shampoo and hair conditioner, in the hope they soften up enough, but otherwise I guess it's back to the fleece or fabric gloves for me, or maybe some less scratchy yarn (I used Sisu sock yarn from my stash) and mitts that aren't as tight.