My Year of Weldon's: Week 1: Lady's Mittens with Thumb Pattern Now Available

About Weldon's Practical Needlework

From Interweave Press:

About 1885, Weldon’s began publishing a series of fourteen-page monthly newsletters, available by subscription, each title featuring patterns and instructions for projects using a single technique.

About 1888, the company began to publish Weldon’s Practical Needlework, each volume of which consisted of twelve issues (one year) of several newsletters bound together with a cloth cover.

Each volume contains hundreds of projects, illustrations, information on little-known techniques, glimpses of fashion as it was at the turn of the twentieth century, and brief histories of needlework. Other techniques treated include making objects from crinkled paper, tatting, netting, beading, patchwork, crewelwork, appliqué, cross-stitch, canvaswork, ivory embroidery, torchon lace, and much more.

From 1999 through 2005, Interweave published facsimiles of the first twelve volumes of Weldon’s Practical Needlework.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Week 1: Lady's Mittens with Thumb Pattern Now Available

Project #1 is done! I knit the mittens in two color schemes: the pink & black version was knit with Brown Sheep Nature Spun Sport yarn and the blue & brown version was knit with Rowan Felted Tweed. Needles used were US #5 for the pink version and #4 for the blue version.

My first thought was to convert the pattern to knit in the round, but I was quite pleased with the original instructions, which were knit flat and seamed. It made a nicely fitting mitten with the thumb in just the right place.

This is a very stretchy mitten, so will easily fit a wide range of hand sizes. You may wish to adjust the number of rows in the mittens to suit the hand size of the wearer; our model has medium size hands. The thumb was a tad long for her, it would be perfect with perhaps 4 rows of main color rather than the 8 rows specified in the pattern.

Free "updated" instructions for knitting this circa 1888 pattern can be found here