Hello everyone! Just a quick post today to let you all know there are still a few spots available in my upcoming workshop at Tolt Yarn and Wool, Mittens in May. This is the traditional mittens workshop I taught at the Nordic Knitting Conference last fall, and I’m so excited to be teaching it again. The workshop will be May 3rd (that’s a week from Sunday) from 11-4.

We’ll be talking about traditional mittens from the Nordic and Baltic countries, and you’ll get to choose a mini-mitten to start working up in class to try out some of the techniques we’ll be discussing. I’ve been working up new samples of the mini mittens in Rauma Finullgarn, a wonderful woolen-spun fingering weight yarn from Norwegian company Rauma:

From left to right, the mittens are: Latvian (focusing on a seamless lined cuff), Estonian (with a vikkel braid), Norwegian (with a Norwegian thumb gusset), and Bohus (in the style of Bohus Stickning, from Bohuslän in Sweden, focusing on combining knits and purls in colorwork with more than two colors per round).

As you can see, all of the mini mittens involve stranded colorwork, so you should have some familiarity with colorwork and knitting small circumferences in the round to take the workshop. Other than that, there’s a wide range of skill levels represented – the Norwegian and Estonian mittens each only use two colors, and you can elect to skip the braid on the Estonian mitten to keep things super simple if you wish. The Latvian mitten brings in a third color, but there’s still never more than two colors per round which keeps the colorwork simple and manageable. It’d be a great stepping stone if you’ve never worked a third color into your colorwork. The six-color Bohus mitten is a beast, I’ll admit, and routinely uses three colors per round in addition to switching between mitts and purls, but there’s also a two-color chart included to keep things simple if you just want to give the knit/purl combo in colorwork a try.

All students will leave the workshop with a booklet containing information about these different traditions, and the mini mitten patterns are included, so you can work up the others later! You’ll be able to apply the techniques for the mini mittens to full-sized ones down the line.

You can stop by the store or give them a call at 425.333.4066 to reserve your spot! Check out the page about the class on the Tolt website for info about materials, etc. here. Tolt carries Rauma Finullgarn so it’ll be easy to pick up supplies for the class there as well. This is a fun, choose-your-own-adventure kind of class I hope to see some of you there!