Hello hello!

I hope you’re all well as can be during these incredibly difficult times. I’ve been busying myself with making for the shop, hiking and planning for our small perennial garden. Repotting plants and finishing up this pattern, yay!

To once again design something! I finally put together a pattern that I’m happy enough with to release to you! I knit, edited and knit and edited this pattern for the past 2 months. While I create these patterns, I channel my university self who would print out papers and edit again and again. The intention was to write a pattern just to familiarize myself with the process again before completing the finishing touches on Pangur Ban, because it had been SO long since I wrote anything. My last pattern was Midhalda which I wrote in October 2020. This past year has been intense with moving provinces – I’ve only felt settled for the past 2 months really. And so, let’s take a look at my new pattern ** Botany Mittens** Come along!

Designing these mittens started with a yellow/green local maritime wool pair. As I knit them, I imagined a picot edge and flowers growing upright along the hand. I thought for sure that a picot edge (which is the scalloped design at the edge of the mitten) would work really well with Icelandic wool but probably not the rustic maritime local wool like Briggs & Little and MacAuslands. Above is the first Icelandic pair and below is a pair with the latter (which I just knit a regular ribbing).

The pattern developed further after setting the basic design with the blue pair featured above. I worked out a few flaws in that design and settled with all the other pairs you can see here!! The rust pair is a little different in that I changed the second colour at the top to make it a wee more interesting. I love how that small addition changed the look of the mittens. My mom read over the pattern for me a couple of times as well (Thank you mama) and she just e-mailed me to tell me I had written in the blocking instructions “soak for 15 mittens” instead of minutes! Even when she sent it to me, I was like “what’s wrong with that?” didn’t even catch it, so to those that purchased the pattern already, I apologize and I do mean minutes >.<

Jamie and I always make an outing of taking pictures. We made tea and went up to the mossy woods behind my parents house back in December to photograph the sweaters we’ve made. Yesterday, we drove to a really beautiful park outside of Halifax called Dollar Lake Provincial Park. We’ve been hiking in the Musquodoboit valley lately and driving right by the entrance to this park. The roads were so icy that we decided to go to the provincial park which was just a little bit closer. We were the only ones there and it was just really beautiful with massive pines and hemlocks and a pretty big beautiful rocky lake. I love provincial parks in Canada, something just feels like I’ve stepped back in time to what I imagine their hey day was in 1965. I love Nova Scotia so much, I don’t know if it’s because I lived on the island for so long but I’m just constantly surprised and amazed by the variety of landscape, by the beautiful parks and nature in general. I feel so fortunate that our backyard is full of lakes and boulders not to mention the Atlantic ocean.

Anyway – this is about mittens! But for me, mittens and knitting is integrally tied to the outdoors. I knit in order to provide warmth while out there (and because I can’t help but knit let’s be honest). So a few details of my folklore herbal witchy mittens…

Knit on DPN (or you can use small circular needles).

Small: 3.75 mm

Med: 4.00 mm

Large: 4.5 mm

Sample uses Lett Lopi wool. However, I also knit a couple with Briggs and Little and MacAuslands. This will knit up slightly larger and skip the picot edging but rather knit a regular 2 x 2 ribbing.

The pattern can be downloaded as a pdf in our Etsy store: Ways of Wood Folk. It is a bit more expensive than my previous patterns because I feel like I put so much more effort into this design and writing of the pattern, in case you’re curious. I feel sometimes that I don’t value my own work enough and I’m beginning to try to address that. I created a 10 % discount code as well for all patterns and art: THANKYOU123. Truly, thank you for supporting my work and process, it means the world ❤

I really hope you like them! I’m on my 9th pair (not crazy at all). Today, there will be about 4 pairs up in the shop. I’ll be making the bags for them this week and mail them out when I can get to the post!

Now it’s time to complete Pangur FINALLY there are no excuses now. Although, I’ve left so much time since last working on it last November that I think I MAY have to make a new sweater to double check everything. If I do decide to, I’ll try to devote a lot of time to the process so that it’s fairly quick.

Upcoming projects to expect include:

More quilt wall pieces with locally sources dyes. I’m beginning to be obsessed with this and just procrastinate by staring at all my earthy colours (see the photo below for a glimpse of why!).

Woodcarving: Spoons in the worlds made from the felled beech trees on our property.

Pangur Sweater: including 5 that will go up in the shop.

Paintings and more art!

B E W E L L F R I E N D S!!