Friday worked out very well considering I had to set my alarm clock before 8am! When I knocked on the door at the home where the workshop was being held, the person who answered the door was Beth Brown-Reinsel herself. What a kind soul she is. I was very happy to be in an environment where the lead was from someone as grounded and gentle, yet passionate, as Beth. She is so knowledgeable and so humble. It was a wonderful experience.

   Beth has been a champion of traditional knitting forms for a long time. She has taken two trips to Scandinavia, studying their folk knitting, and is planning a trip to Estonia as well. She clearly has a great love for these knitted artforms, as do I. I enjoyed the brief moments I had where I could talk with her. There were so many folks there that I didn’t want to wear out my welcome by chatting long, as I would have loved to do.

The mitten design we knit together is very much like the one that my Great-Aunt Ingeborg knit for me when I was a child. (Or is that Great-Great Aunt? I’m not sure what her relationship to me was.) She knit hers in navy and cream wool, a very traditional Norwegian color scheme. I seem to remember she made my mittens in a finer wool, the mittens did not seem bulky to me as a child.

The mitten I made yesterday was worsted weight feltable wool. The main color was dark purple (nearly eggplant) by Babbajoes, and contrast was a pale almost-white four-ply where two plies are a light natural heathered grey and two plies are a very light cream (it’s Cascade 220, maybe what they call Quattro but I’m not sure). It turned out very nicely, with a bit of depth and yet you can still read the two-color patterning. Honestly, I was just knitting from whatever yarn I had in the stash, but it turned out very well.

I knit two-color stranded knitting pretty loosely, and I have a smallish hand. The pattern we followed in class was a one-size pattern, and even though I chose the smaller size needle option, my mitten turned out about the size Brian would need. it is abut an inch too long in the hand, 3/4″ too long in the thumb for me to wear. The gauge is certainly dense enough for worsted-weight yarn, and Brian noticed how warm these would be because of the double-thick stranded knitting. I am not sure if I’ll make another so he can wear them, or just keep this single one for posterity. Maybe some year I’ll make myself a pair out of sportweight yarn. That is, when I can finally knit for myself without planning to teach a class about the thing I’m knitting.

It took a full day of sitting and knitting by staring at a chart, to make one mitten. I don’t know when I could put aside two days to make a pair of mittens for myself, considering that I wouldn’t wear them much and that I couldn’t make them into a class somehow.

This is the nature of being a knitting professional. You can knit a lot of the time, but you have to keep in mind whether it would be something that would serve the business or not. Things that are truly for self, need to wait for days off… and sometimes days off can be far apart. I notice when I say I have a “day off,” it means I didn’t schedule any classes. It doesn’t seem to mean I don’t work at my business. Days off, instead of being a teacher, I’m a secretary/bookkeeper/publicist. It could be much worse, trust me.

This life is still much better than waking up at 6am to drive in the snow to a factory in Detroit, to teach a roomfull of folks how to use Microsoft Powerpoint, Word, Excel or Access. That is what I did for 6 years. It was interesting work but I did not enjoy the schedule. Therefore, I’m not complaining very loud… but I do wonder if I’ll ever wear a pair of these Norwegian mittens!

Oh, a very cool thing I learned in class… I learned how to do stranded two-color knitting holding both colors of yarn in the left hand. I usually knit continental style, and I knew that in Norway they hold both colors in the left hand to do stranded colorwork. However, I tried it once and the yarn got really tangled. I gave up that plan and started holding one yarn in the left hand and one in the right (I had learned to knit as a child, holding my yarn in my right hand, so I already knew how to knit with either hand). Well, it turns out that there is a trick where the two colors feed through different sides of the middle finger of your left hand, and it keeps them from getting tangled. It was wonderful! I did the whole mitten with this technique and it sure was faster than throwing half my stitches with my right hand, at least for me. Loved it!

It was worth the whole thing, just to sit in that room with all those folks who also love knitting as I do, and who understand this passion for all things knitted, particularly knitted folk artforms. I had a wonderful time.

Photos: 1) Beth talking to participants in the workshop, 2&3) my mitten, palm and back of hand, 4) Margaret and Sharon, talking and sharing during a slow moment, 5) Beth’s Mittens, one of many pairs she brought with her.