I belong to a group of twined knitters that meet about once a month and knit together. In January we were asked if we wanted to participate in a knit along. Our inspiration was the old twined knitted bridegroom gloves from Ore parish in Dalarna. We studied photos available on the internet and shared knowledge and information. Some of us have visited Ore and seen and charted some of the mittens. The yarn I used is spun at Wålstedts in Dala-Floda. The dark brown is natural, the coloured ones I have dyed myself.
It is up to each of us to decide how to go about this. I decided to make a pair of mittens inspired by the old mittens, the placing of the patterns, the colours etc. Others will make gloves using very thin yarn to get as close to the old mittens as possible. Compared to the old ones I think that these are rather akward looking, much more mittens for every day use and not belonging at a wedding.
There are details in the Ore tradition that I think are very nice, for example the decoration parallell to the thumb gore. There are many variations of how this is done and all of them are worth trying. I knitted this with two brown strands for the back-ground and two loose strands (one red and one yellow) for the zig-zag pattern. In that way I did not have to bother with carrying the red and yellow strands in floats around each row.
All in all I am getting used to these mittens. They will do nicely for next winter. If you want to check out our knit-along blog (only in Swedish) you´ll find it here
Stickat från Ore.
