Winter White

Lately there has been a lot of white around, both outside...

And inside...

I finished knitting these mittens a couple of weeks ago.  The yarn is Knit Picks Telemark 100% wool.  Needles:  US3 dpns.  For some time I had been looking for something to do with this yarn that has been in my stash for too long.  The natural white yarn kept saying "Aran" to me, so I decided to make a pair of mittens using motifs from The Harmony Guide to Aran and Fair Isle Knitting.  This was my first attempt at designing my own mitten pattern.  The process was both fun and challenging for me.  I know I definitely learned as I went along.  On a second pair, I would do a few things differently, but overall I'm satisfied with them.  I like to call them the Makem and Clancy Mittens in honor of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, traditional Irish folk singers, who always performed in lovely creamy Aran sweaters.  I've donated the mittens to Access Arts as part of their fundraising efforts.

And one last bit of winter white - some creamy white handspun yarn which I finished up on New Year's Eve.  This yarn started out as a pound of Blue Faced Leicester combed top from Yarn Barn.  This roving was so easy and fun to spin, I was sorry to use it up.  I spun a soft single, then made a two ply yarn.  After washing, I ended up with 645 yards of soft bouncy yarn which could be worn next to the skin without irritation.  Now I'm trying to decide if I want to dye half of it, perhaps a medium blue, and do some color pattern knitting.  There are some appealing hat patterns in a new book I've borrowed from the library - Quick Nordic Knits by Ann-Mari Nilsson.  

Of course, dyeing the yarn would be straying from the "white" theme, but what's the harm in that?  In a couple of months nature too will stray from her white theme when she opens up her spring paintbox.