Pinion Break: Da Meids Mitts

Last week a knitting pal shared her plans to make Katie's Kep, a Fair Isle hat from the 2020 Shetland Wool Week annual.  I got intensely jealous, which led me to set aside the Pinions project at Pinion 15 and make a Fair Isle project.  

Pictured on the cover of the 2021 Annual, Da Meids Mitts by Alison Rendall seemed like a good candidate to consider.  I was delighted that there were three colorways, all using Uradale Yarns Organic Native Shetland Wool.  I have curated a small collection of their yarn from both online and in-person purchases, and felt confident that I would have enough of each color to make one of the three designs.  I love working with this yarn because it has a rustic, natural appearance.

Turns out I did not have enough yarn in the designated colors.  I thought I might substitute in some other shetland yarns, but in the end decided to modify the color combinations.  We'll call it Colorway Four.

Combining colors in Fair Isle projects is a skill that I am still developing.  I made some important progress in this effort last fall when I took Tracey Doxie's color blending workshop during Wool Week, and then a follow-up workshop with her several weeks later.  For Colorway Four I opted to use three background shades, going from light to dark: Slett, Laebrakk, and Moorit.  The foreground colors were Ling Heath, Sea Pink, and Flukkra, going from dark to light.  I used Tormentil Heath for the lace cuff and the "singing" line at the center of the front Fair Isle pattern.  I normally use the same light-dark direction for back- and foreground, but I realized for this project that I need to exaggerate the contrasts between them to make the colors I had on hand work in the design. 

A strategy for blending colors and ensuring adequate contrast between back and foreground is to view the yarn choices through your camera's monochromatic setting. Here we can see that Sea Pink and Laebrakk are very close together, so I opted to minimize how much they were used in the same rows.

The advice we all hear and often disregard is to make a swatch.  The benefit of the swatch was hugely emphasized in Tracey's workshop, and I did consider doing one for this project.  However, any swatch I would have made would be the same size as the mitts, so I just went for it.  I knew I could tear it back and make some adjustments, although I decided I was happy with the original plan for Colorway Four.

I had some help finishing the first mitt.  

Alison Rendall suggests drying the mitts on a glove board, reminding me that I had acquired a set of these during one of my visits to the Shetland Textile Museum.  I'm using them upside down in an effort to block the lace and not stretch out the ribbing at the top of the mitt.

On to mitt two!