Memento Mori Mittens

My new pattern, Memento Mori Mittens, is up! It's a fun mitten to knit with a lot of detailing that starts right at the cuff all the way to the tip. And flowers everywhere! I spend a fair bit of time reading about various imagery and customs related to death when working on a series of photographs, and found it as a whole quite interesting.  I recently came across some working sketches I did and liked what was going on. I wanted to do something more with them, so of course I thought mittens! I decided to use a really colourful sock yarn (Marks & Kattens Fame Trend in Party  - #653) as the background colour to stress that these are not a sinister mitten. Skulls aren't all doom and gloom! Even if the title does implore you to consider your own mortality. I really like the patterning on the palm. I wanted to echo the flower detail on the back of the hand, so I decided on simple flowers and started framing around them, which eventually turned into the pattern you see.

This pattern is a great way to use a beautiful soft sock yarn. Pair a bright or vagrieated yarn with a dark solid, or two contrasting colours together (even better if they are tonal-dyed!) for a mitten that really pops. Think golden yellow with grassy-green, icy blue and red-orange or inky black with bright purple. If you are wearing something everyday for half a year (at least up here), you want it to feel and look good.

You need about 200 meters of fingering weight yarn for the background colour, and about 100 meters of fingering weight for the design, size 2 (2.75mm) needles, a bit of waste yarn and a needle to weave in the ends. If you have not tried using the Magic Loop for mitten knitting before, I really suggest trying it, as I find my colourwork to be so much more even compared to when I use double-pointed needles. Techniques used in the pattern include stranded colourwork, knitting in the round, increasing and decreasing and my favorite mitten cuff decoration, the Latvian Braid (you can find a tutorial here if you need one).