Trial and Error

My living room and dining rooms are once again looking like a yarn shop exploded inside. There are many projects languishing on the floor, a chair or two, several baskets, the table, the sofa. Right now all of the big projects are tossed aside for some mittens.

Several weeks ago I went to Brattleboro, Vermont to take a class in Latvian Fingerless Mitts with Beth Brown-Reinsel. Beth is a great instructor and knows her topic well. A bonus was that two or three people in the class had real Latvian mittens with them. I never caught whether they had traveled to Latvia or someone from their family had. It was very nice to see the real thing up close. Like a dummy, I didn't take any pictures of those examples. I should have. One pair was knit at 12 stitches to the inch; really beautiful work.

I was happy with the class. I was not happy with the yarn I had taken to use for the sample. It was too thick and I didn't like the color choices I'd made. I ripped a lot of it out before I remembered to take a photo -- this is the cuff.

I had the right yarn, but it was much thinner and the class example had been knit for a DK or worsted weight yarn...so I gritted my teeth and followed along.

I learned that Latvians are serious about mittens. Like crazy serious. Like knitting a hundred pairs before you get married serious. These are definitely not just items of clothing to keep your hands warm. In 2006, when the Nato summit was held in Latvia, they knit 4,500 pairs of mittens to give to all the delegates and staff of the summit. Think I'm exaggerating? Go see the photos of all the mittens...yup somebody took a picture of every one of those mittens. Scroll down the page a little and you can click on links to see the men's and women's mittens from each of the four regions in Latvia.

I wanted to come up with my own version. I knew it wasn't going to be very authentic because the colors I had were all wrong. But it was a design challenge. I had the book, Latvian Mittens, by Lizbeth Upitis, but I'd never knit anything out of it - not even a swatch. Armed with the charts in that book and the 4,500 photos of mittens, I thought surely I could come up with something I liked.

Here's the first attempt at a cuff. The edge came out all wrong - too much ruffle and something about the multiple colors just didn't work.  And I really hated the big circles.

So I went back to the photos. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which ones I did like and analyzing what drew me to those. Here's what I came up with in the end.  The cuff isn't very traditional.  I had to make some compromises because I was having a hard time fitting the pattern repeats into the number of stitches I had to work with.

Now I just have to stick with it long enough to actually finish them. The fun part is done. And I hear other projects laying around here calling my name.