One of the things I've been working on over the past week was adapting the Origami Mitten pattern to be a felted pattern. I know some of you know the various ways to make felt, but I'll give a quick explanation for the felt-curious among us.
There are three basic ways to make wool felt. You can knit something out of wool and then throw it in a washing machine on the hot cycle and get felt. Anyone who has accidently shrunk a wool sweater is all too familiar with this method, but when done on purpose, there are a variety of possible results. The advantage is that this method gives quite a bit of control over the shape of a three dimensional object. The disadvantage is that knitting a giant piece takes some time, although the felting itself is pretty quick and painless.
The second method is needle felting, in which you take wool and stab it repeatedly with a special needle, very sharp and barbed. The advantage of needle felting is that it is possible to make finely detailed sculptural forms or even wool "paintings." The disadvantage is it is quite labor intensive and is generally better suited to small objects.
The third method, which is the one I use most often, is wet felting. Unspun wool is layered, then moistened with hot water and soap, and agitated by rubbing or rolling until it becomes a cohesive sheet of felt. The advantage to wet felting is that it is pretty fast and is suitable for larger pieces. One disadvantage is that larger pieces take a lot of room, since shrinkage rates of about 40% are not uncommon. In other words, you have to lay out a huge sheet of wool to get a finished piece that is almost half the size.
So for this project, I wanted to adapt a knitting pattern so that the finished knitting could be felted. This is always somewhat of a high wire act and requires trial and error. My tried and true method of adapting a knitting pattern for felting is to knit it much more loosely on larger needles, using the exact same pattern that I would for a knit piece that was not going to be felted.
I tried this with the Origami pattern, knitting it on large needles using the same wool and same pattern as I have used previously. I decided that I wanted rib knit cuffs, just as with the originals, that would be unfelted to retain their elasticity, so I worked a round of cotton around the cuff area. The cotton will not felt, but will leave holes when I remove it so I can pick up stitches to add the ribbing later. Then it was into a hot wash cycle, and here's what I got:

They look pretty good. One concern I had was that I did not want the mittens to felt too hard, as they would be stiff, but these turned out very nicely. The fabric feels good.
My one complaint about these is the thumbs. They are enormous. There are a couple of ways to fix this - for now, I can hand felt just the thumbs until they become a more anatomically correct size. In the future, I can knit the thumbs smaller at a tighter gauge so they won't have to shrink so much to be proportional.
The mittens reminded me of a quirky Tom Robbins novel called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I like Robbins' writing - he's an inveterate smart ass, and while I haven't read his work in a while, I used to appreciate his weird sense of humor. Anyway, in this particular novel, his heroine, Sissy Hankshaw, was born with enormous thumbs, and she used what might have been a disadvantage to become a successful hitchiker. Strange, I know. But I can't help thinking that Sissy Hankshaw would have appreciated these mittens.
The novel was made into a movie, but as is the case with many adaptations, the flavor of the writing was lost on the film. Nevertheless, if you happen to know someone with enormous thumbs, I have a pair of mittens for them. Hitchiking is optional.