Sometimes a yarn decides it wants to be something else than what you originally intended.

Patti from Sweet Grass Wool sent me some skeins of her luscious Targhee to play with. I had a fingerless mitten pattern in mind, with sinuous cables curving back & forth (never crossing, so not sure if I should call them cables precisely, but regardless), a little asymmetric, dividing the mitt into moss, garter & stockinette stitch sections.  I thought it sounded nifty, and the charts definitely looked neat.  I decided to try her single ply hand dyed skein.  I did a little swatch of a cable and some moss stitch (really just to verify needle size) and it was scrumptious.

I cast on.  The yarn loved the broken rib ribbing.  However, when I got to the main pattern, the yarn said no.  It liked the moss stitch (a lot), and it liked a little bit of the waviness, but the rest? Nope.  Not one bit.  It wanted to be simpler, more…manly.  Which is actually fine — there aren’t that many manly mitt options.

I’ll be looking for a couple testers in the Ravelry FPT group in the next few days — if you’d like to be a test knitter, watch for the post.