Latvian Mittens "Autumn Leaves"
After our trip to Riga I immediately had to cast on a pair of the colourwork mitten kit's I purchased at Hobbywool. I bought a total of two kits along with the book "Knit like a Latvian" and many, many hanks of wool. How could I resist when the cute little 25g hanks only cost 1,50 euro?
For the "Autumn Leaves" pattern I got 4 lovely colours in the kit. Each mitten kit comes with more than enough yarn to make two mittens (I have more than enough left for use as accent colours in other projects later), written instructions that are the same in all kits with basic Latvian techniques explained and a page of colourwork chart for the mitten where the pattern specific details are listed - such as the total number of stitches to cast on etc.
They recommend to use a 1,5 mm double pointed needle for making the traditional mittens, but for me that would have made these specific ones way to small. The chart called for me to cast on only 62 stitches with a 17 st per 5 cm gauge (most patterns use about 72), so to get to a size that would fit me with me I had to go up to a 2,5 mm needle and got 15 st per 5 cm.
I love how the colours turned out, that intense pop of orange against the more muted and dark tones. It was a challenge to work with three strands at once, much swearing and some tension issues, one thumb is a little shorter than the other because of my lack of patience and knitting while tired, but all in all it got done and I now have a pair of lovely mittens for winter.
Ravelry project page: Latvian Mittens
