Selbu Mittens
Link to Ravelry project: Hilmar Kulsets votter * Kulseth Selbu mitten
Stranded colourwork has always been an aspect of knitting that I admire massively but also felt was way beyond me. A couple of months ago, I met someone at my knitting group who’d chosen the Porcelain Sweater as her first ever knitting project and had successfully done the beautiful colourwork - maybe I was building it up to be much scarier in my head than it was!
As a first colourwork project I didn’t want something too big but I also wanted to make something that I was actually going to love and use. I saw a number of mittens in the style of “Selbuvott” (or Selbu mittens) that I really loved and decided a pair would be a great starting project for colourwork.
I love reading about the history of different crafts and Selbuvott have an incredibly rich history so I bought a copy of the English translation of “Selbu Mittens: Discover the Rich History of a Norwegian Knitting Tradition” which contains hundreds of charts so you can design your own Selbu mittens, a bunch of full patterns, and a lot of information about the history and construction of these iconic mittens.
Since these mittens aren’t very big, there was no need to do a separate swatch as knitting the first half was the same thing! So on that basis, I cast on my first mitten and tried to figure out how best to hold both yarns. I landed on “double continental” style with both colours held in my left hand as trying to hold one colour in each hand had me more confused and struggling to tension.
After the first two small rows of colourwork, I realised I was holding the yarns the wrong way round compared with the yarn dominance suggested in the book so I switched over and continued.
By the time I got to the thumb hole, I was thoroughly hooked on colourwork (at least for this project!) and this mitten took over all my knitting time as the only thing I wanted to be working on. In just 3 days, I finished the mitten, got very excited when I tried it on and it fit, then set it aside to start the second.
The second mitten was only trickier in the sense that I had to read the pattern left to right which, while that’s how I accidentally read charts when I first started out, felt very counterintuitive when trying to keep track of where along a row I was. I started using a long post-it note to cover the rows completed so I didn’t need to keep double checking which row I was working on - this also made picking it up after a break easier.
Picking up stitches for the thumb was very confusing as I needed to make sure the pattern that I’d drawn out to use for the first mitten would work for the mirror image and still be a seamless transition on the palm when folded down (as is standard on Selbu mittens). I must’ve picked up, undone, and redone the first round 5 times before I was finally happy with where the stitches were sitting in the row. I’m sure that means I’d done something wrong which is why it wasn’t aligning easily but hopefully that’ll come with practice and experience.
The points and bind offs on the second mitten are much neater and I really feel like I learnt a lot throughout this project. My second mitten is every so slightly smaller (about 1/4” width-wise) which reflects me getting more comfortable with my tension and realising I didn’t need my stitches to be so loose to keep the floats a good tension.
I’m disappointed I didn’t get them finished in time for a holiday to Wales but I did still manage to get a couple of weeks’ wear before Spring fully arrived and, as I always remind myself with me-made clothing, there’s always next year! They’re not quite as warm or windproof as I was hoping so I might investigate using fingering weight yarn or a tighter gauge in the future as, while these are great for general day to day, when the weather drops to below freezing as it has the last few winters, it would be good to have some seriously warm mittens.
The yarn has been absolutely lovely to use and bloomed quite well when blocking, although the purple yarn has bloomed more than the white leaving it slightly uneven - this may be user error though as I prewashed the purple skein to prevent bleeding. It’s a wonderfully woolly yarn and I suspect it’ll last well. Another bonus is that a pair of these mittens has used just under half a skein of each colour so I think I’ll be knitting up another pair to either gift or sell.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend this pattern for a beginner mitten knitter though. As my first, I found the instructions lacking and there are definitely errors in the chart/instructions that I spent a while scratching my head over before eventually figuring out a way to fudge it to come out roughly right. It’s a lovely design and I thought doing a DK pair of mittens would be easier for a first go than fingering weight but I don’t think this was the best pattern to choose. Ravelry has a number of projects for this pattern and almost all reference the way that they worked around the errors so it looks like it’s a case of doing what you think rather than their being a “correct” solution.
