Rainbow Brite!

When I was little, I LOVED Rainbow Brite. I had the doll and her horse, Starlite, and always wanted one of the Sprites. Anyway, I recently participated in an 80's Cartoon swap, and was hoping hoping hoping that my partner liked Rainbow Brite because I wanted, originally, to make legwarmers that looked like her awesome puffy boots! Well, My partner did like Rainbow Brite, but when I was trying to work out a pattern for legwarmers, they looked terrible, so I ended up scrapping that and did a quick search for some fingerless gloves. Lo and behold, others out there love the RB as much as I do, and I found this pattern. So, I spent probably close to an hour finding the right colors that went together, but which didn't look too "primary" or childish, and then set to work on them during my vacation in Oregon.

I was slightly confused at first, because these mitts are knit inside out for the wrist section, thus leading them to look like this as I was going along:

I had some serious doubts. I also wasn't paying attention to the pattern as much as I should and missed that I was to be decreasing every new section, so had to frog the entire cuff of my first one down to the green in order to fix that issue. Serves me right for not looking at the pattern. I also adjusted the pattern just a bit to increase the "bubble" effect on the wrist part, knitting for 8 rows and purling for 5 instead of 7 and 7.

Anyway, when it came time to turn the glove "right" side out, I was relieved to find that they looked exactly as I had wanted them to look!

Ignore the fact that you can see serious seams where I changed needles. That is a personal knitting problem that I have yet to fix, but which I have learned to remedy when sewing in ends and making final adjustments. :)

The pattern called for some color work in the hand to knit in a yellow star. I suck at color work. I hate color work. I decided not to do the darn yellow color work star on the blue background and told myself I'd figure it out later. So, here is the final product-- sans star.

But, somehow, it just wasn't right without the little star on the hand, so I decided to cut a star out of felt and sew it on with blanket stitch. I found a halloween cookie cutter in the shape of a star which was exactly the right size, so didn't have to struggle with my terrible star drawing skills! Here they are with the stars:

So cute, right!? I was sort of sad to part with them, but since my swap partner had told me she has had past bad swapping experiences, I felt like maybe these and the other awesome stuff I sent her would help to make up for the crappy times in the past. Once she receives the package, I'll post another blog with all the awesome 80's items in it. :)