I’m really in love with mittens right now, and I am going to be making a bunch over the next month. The first finished pair to show is my lovely Selbuvotter Annemor #11 (aka traditional Norwegian fair isle mittens), which I finally finished. Remember this post last October about the Selbuvotter “gloves” I had started. If you noticed, I just said I finished a pair of “mittens” not “gloves.” Well, that’s because when I got to the part to start the fingers, I got scared and put the project away, and unfortunately it didn’t resurface until a week ago. After careful deliberation, I decided it would be better if I just made them as mittens and be done with them. So that’s what I did.

On the first mitten, I had already done the cuff
and had moved onto the back of hand pattern.
The tricky thing, and also the beautiful thing, about these mittens is that they are patterned on every inch and every side of knitting. Luckily I can knit with both hands, so it made fair isle stranding very easy (quick explanation: you carry 1 color in one hand and 1 color in the other and only knit with that specific hand when that color is needed–using both hands goes waaaay fast and helps prevent tangles).
Since the pattern was written for gloves, I had to decide how to turn them into mittens and still maintain a pretty pattern on the back of the hand. I looked at other patterns in the book that were mittens and counted the number of rows. I figured out I was able to do a second repeat of the flower/clover pattern and do the mitten decreases.
The thumb was a bit tricky just because they are smaller and it was harder to maneuver the two colors, but luckily my thumbs are short, so I didn’t even complete the whole chart in the pattern. I started the second mitten right away because I knew I would loose momentum if I left it too long, and I was able to finish it in three days. I wore them to work this morning, which was an overcast, rainy, chilly 40 degrees, and they were perfect.