As Valentine’s Day approaches the web turns mushy and gooey with the love-related posts.  So when I saw this on Boing Boing, it seemed a natural to grab and re-post here. It’s a link to a knitting pattern so you can knit your own lover’s mitten, which was cleverly called the Smitten(tm).  Brilliant, thought I, let’s use this and actually post some frigging blog content already.

Steal the picture, add some clever words: bingo, a blog post. That would have been the end of it, except that the more I dug into the world of smittens, the more there was to know.  For instance a quick search turns up over 10 000 000 hits for smittens, inexplicably.  A scan of the top hits shows smittens.biz where it seems you can buy smittens.  Wonderful.  Then we have Smitten.com, where it seems you can buy, er, smittens.  Super.  It should be noted that Smittens.biz sells smittens for twice the price of Smitten.com, which makes me a whole lot less smitten about the idea myself.  Then we wander off to the Boing Boing link which tells you how to knit your own damn smittens for less.  So, the lesson to the creator of smittens (whoever you are) is: did you forget to patent your invention for needy couples?  Crap.  Bet you won’t forget that next time….

As a bonus from the Boing Boing comments, a related yet cuter product for parent-child dancing:

From a site called Babygadget, it’s a concept, and not a real product, predictably.

Note:  No “silly kittens” jokes were made during the making of this post.