Tuesday 28 February 2012

Fingerless mittens from Heidal

Here comes another pair of fingerless mittens in my series of mittens based on Heidi Fossnes' book "Håndplagg til bunad og folkedrakter". Originally, this embroidery was sewn on a pair of black mittens that was found in Heidal, in Nord-Gubrandsdalen. The original pair came to museum in 1911, so they are probably from the last half of the 1900th century. You can find a picture of a reproduction of the original pair of mittens here.

These fingerless mittens are knitted in a yarn called Falk from Dale. The pattern for the fingerless mittens is originally from another pattern in the book, and comes from Valle in Setesdal. The embroidery is done with a fine wool thread from Appelton. I doubled the thread to give the pattern more fullness.
This was a fairly easy and fast pair of mittens to make, and the embroidery was easy to get pretty even if the mittens are knitted in a relatively thick yarn with (in this context) relatively large needles (2 mm). The pattern was a bit too big for the fingerless mittens, but I made them go into the upper edge, which made them look pretty anyway. I highly recommend this pattern, even if it probably looks best on a black pair of mittens as in the original.

Monday 20 February 2012

Fingerless mittens from Ål in Hallingdal

Here comes the next pair in my series of mittens based on Heidi Fossnes' book "Håndplagg til bunad og folkedrakter". The original pair came Ål i Hallingdal, and came to the museum in1892. They do, however, not know how old the mittens are.

My mittens are knitted in Dale Baby Ull on needles 1,5 mm.  The mittens are embroidered with a fine wool thread from Appelton.

These mittens are relatively easy to make compared to many of the other mittens, as the thin yarn and needles makes it easier to get the embroidery even. This is a good pair to start on, together with the other pair of fingerless mittens from Ål in Hallingdal that I have made, if you like to try to make these kinds of embroidered mittens for the first time.

Sunday 12 February 2012

Fingerless mittens with rose seam



My latest project has been a series of fingerless mittens and driving mittens based on patterns from Heidi Fossnes' book "Håndplagg til bunad og folkedrakter". Here is the first pair. It is a couple of fingerless mittens with an embroidery of rose seam found on a pair of gloves from Tinn in Telemark. The original pair of gloves was found on Vaalund Gård, and is probably from around the turn of the century.


The mittens are knitted in a wool yarn called Falk from Dale. The pattern for the mittens is also from Heidi Fossnes' book, and originates from Valle in Setesdal. The rose seam is embroidered in a fine woll yarn from Appelton. There is an incredible amount of beutiful shades of colours, which made the task of finding the yarn for the embroidery easy.

The rose seam is sewn with contour stitches, also as fillings. This makes the embroidery almost three dimensional. You should probably use a thicker more hard spun thread for this kind of embroidery, but I did not find this kind of thread with sufficiently large array of colours in my local craft store.