I made my first thing out of drop-spindled yarn, and it is a pair of fingerless mittens.

Project Specs:

Pattern design: ‘Welted Fingerless Mittens’ by Churchmouse Yarns and Teas
Yarn: assorted 100% Wool Yarns in random bits and pieces, handspun by me in no particular order
Needles: 3.25mm dpns
Ravelled: here

To make my yarn, I took a biscuit tin and filled it with oddments of fluff from my felt-making days. There was an assortment of poll dorset tops dyed at a natural dyeing workshop; some combed merino tops from my felt-making days; and some miscellaneous bits of wool which I have very little information on.

The point was to have fun playing with colours, and to not overthink this process in any way. I picked out blues, beiges, greens, turquoises, whites and very pale yellows and spun them with joy on my drop spindle. After making 2 singles, I plied them together and counted up around 88m of yarn.

Then I remembered that several years ago my good friend Caro had sent me a lovely skein of yarn in similarly random teal/grey/green colours, and happily I saw that her handspun yarn (I think she made it on her wheel) both harmonised with mine, and knit up at the same gauge. What are the chances? I knew then that these yarns needed to be included together into a project and I scoured Ravelry for something small and fairly instant, which would work with my yardage.

I found the instantly gratifying and super easy Welted Fingerless Mittens pattern by Churchmouse Yarns and Teas. I was sold on the combination of the photo of the mittens holding a bird’s nest, the wonderful name of the company, and the easy but interesting construction of the mittens in question. I cast on in the car on Saturday, knitted intermittently over the weekend and a little on Tuesday night, and then bound off all my edges and wove in the ends last night.

Voila.

I used Caro’s yarn on the purl bands on the cuffs, and at the edge, just before the bind off. Our colours and the yarns together remind me of many things I like sharing with Caro (raw fleece, eggs, streams, oceans, rocks, lichens, leaves, mushrooms, trees…)

It cracks me up that we made the same yarn, basically, when we learned to spin.

As you can see, my devil-may-care attitude to plying and combining my colours has led to a less than matching pair of mittens!

This makes me exceedingly happy.

For I did not want a matchy matchy pair of mittens; I wanted to play with colours. There is so much to see in the different colour combinations which my randomised spindling resulted in; pale yellow and pale blue together – who knew it was a thing? Olive green and sky blue, anyone?

Here is BORERAY FLEECE, washed and ready for my next spinning project:

All this woolliness reminds me that WOVEMBER is just 7 weeks away… what shall we do to celebrate WOOL together, apart from wearing more of it, now that the cold is creeping in, and such things as mitts are becoming necessary again in the evening snap?