Here is a pair of my favourite mittens, not my all-time favourite, but pretty darned close. I made these in 2002 from locally sourced Romney that I washed, carded, dyed and spun. The pattern is from Marcia Lewandowski's Folk Mittens book.
I love these mittens -- they are strong, warm and beautiful. They are nearly 9 years old but are still holding up. In fact I am featuring them today out of respect for the hard work they helped me do yesterday, with no complaints.
Yesterday morning we had a window of no-rain, so we decided to tidy up the leaves that are taking over the landscape around our farmhouse. There were 10 huge piles of leaves that needed moving to the leaf-dump-zone. As much as I hate this part of the job, we were aided by the fact that the leaves were slightly damp and a little frozen. That meant that when we put them into the wheelbarrow, they stayed there.
It was a cold, crisp morning so I foraged around the house looking for a sturdy pair of mittens to wear. And these won. They may look fancy, but the yarn is strong and the double stranded knitting gives thickness so they act as work gloves, of a sort. Not only are they strong and warm, but after they got quite filthy from picking up the leaves, especially the walnut leaves, they washed up just fine.
These are not fancy-pant leave-me-in-the-drawer-and-only-take-me-out-for-special-occasion mittens. They are everything you'd want in a mitten. They are strong, warm. And of course, beautiful.
After all these years.
PS - You can spin enough yarn for these mittens in an evening. I just weighed them and they are 105 grams. However, the yarn I used was from my early spinning so it is over twisted and dense -- which probably accounts for their durability -- so you may not need 105 grams. In the pattern, they are only two colours, but I added the pink, as I didn't have enough of the yellow -- and needed to finish them.
No comments:
Post a Comment