I offered to knit something for my dad for his birthday awhile back and he chose classic Setesdal mittens. These Norwegian mittens use the same lice pattern as the better known Norwegian sweaters. The pattern is from Marcia Lewandowski's book Folk Mittens, which adapts several sweater patterns to cover hands. I had to size them up considerably to fit his hands--they went up to Ariadne's elbow when she tried them on.
Above you see the left one inside out, and the right one as it ought to be. I've had a lot of fun with color work lately. It is not nearly as hard as it looks. If you knit, try it! Holding one piece of yarn Continental and the other English (so you have one in each hand) is very tidy and efficient.
I got through the first mitten pretty quickly and without any mistakes. Then I took a break to knit Charlotte a sweater--which took FOREVER. Luckily, when I returned to knit the second mitten my gauge was the same and they came out the same size (yay!-- the first pair of mittens I knit were barely wearable, since one was three inches longer than the other). I did make a couple of mistakes on the snowflake pattern of the second one, however.
The first snowflake on the left is missing its white center stitch. Not to fear, swiss darning to the rescue!
The above is a picture of swiss darning. Basically, I am just sewing over the offending stitch with the correct color. This is also used when traditional color work would be impractical--like if you only wanted one red stitch in a whole row of knitting.
Ta-da! All fixed.
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