After the dazzling display of leaves throughout the month of October, I always welcome the more subtle beauty of this grey and gold month. The wild blueberry fields are blazing with red, the tamarack trees (or larch) a brilliant orange/yellow. As you walk under them, the needles gently fall among your feet. Our walks have been so pleasant with cooler temperatures and the sun lowering himself in the sky. I do love November!

It’s also that solid month that all things wool come out of the quilted bags I have stuffed to the brim with our knits. Fingerless mitts, touques, cowls. The most practical for us is our fingerless mitts. Jamie and I are often going out to bring wood in, going for walks with a thermos and a camera, simply enjoying the beautiful outdoors in this quickly darkening month. I can’t tell you how many times I have found myself out in the woods cursing myself for underestimating how cold it was and not bringing them with me!

So, last year I knit up this very simple pattern with the intention of submitting it for a book which never saw the light of day. So many projects last year were cast aside. Last winter I was so excited about everything that I renewed my interest in a lot of my work. I had a few people ask me about this particular pattern so I decided to write out a pattern and knit a couple of pairs… and then the pandemic happened. And well, it sucked every ounce of interest in knitting and the shop completely out of me. I threw myself into gardening, books and learning some new skills.

Come this Autumn, I was asked to create a project that completely reinvigorated my interest and excitement over our knitting shop and all my creative endeavours (I’ll share with you next year what this project was, I completed it last week and am so excited to share with you but it will have to wait until 2021 :)) so slowly I began to re-visit some old patterns. So my friends, here is my Foxtail Icelandic Fingerless mitts!

My intention for these mitts was to make a simple but elegant looking pattern that would be achievable for beginners venturing into colourwork. Knit with Lett-lopi and just an interchange of 2 colours, it really is a good introductory pattern as well as just for any Icelandic wool lover 🙂 I love, love, love knitting fingerless mitts with lopi wool because it allows me to explore colour combinations. Icelandic wool has such beautiful colours that perfectly represent different aspects of our rich and diverse natural world. Every walk I go on, I see 2 colours juxtaposed against eachother and think “I’d love to knit something with those colours!” it’s endless! It can be as simple as a steel grey sky against the moody ocean or reindeer lichen and stones. Nature is our greatest teacher.

I hope you like these mittens! Thank you very much for just coming by to see them and the photos that Jamie and I have taken over the past couple of days.

I have a lot more to share… really so much. Our lives are going through a lot of changes right now and I just want to hold on to some things before I share on here. I’m not being active mainly because of these changes and we are just busy.

I also just got a new phone as well so will likely start sharing more often. My old pixel would randomly shut off – especially when I was outside for some reason.  Planned obsolescence at its finest I suppose. I really held off getting a new phone once my old one started to malfunction because I was just fed up with that world of constantly upgrading and getting something new regardless of the cost to the environment, the people who manufacture the phones and the consumer. We are stuck in some unhealthy cycles but there are still things we can do, like joining nature for our entertainment! Making our own clothes and food, using our local libraries, consuming less in general, etc.

And that is just what I’m planning to do now friends. It’s a beautiful, beautiful November day and by 5 oclock, it will be dark as night. Henry is patiently waiting (whining) beside me so I’m going to get out to a trail and walk and walk for awhile before dinner and an evening of old movies, knitting and playing mandolin.

Many blessings on everyone! Thanks for reading and peace ❤