Nålbound mittens and handwoven potholders

It’s a bit late, but I can finally show you what I made for Christmas presents for my family. I wove handy potholders for my mother and my brother and gave my father the nålbound mittens he has been wishing for a long time!

The nålbound mittens

Making these mittens for my father was one of the reasons I wanted to learn nålbinding in the first place. Of course, I also wanted to make socks and mittens for my historical costuming but already as a child, I wanted to learn this skill my grandmother had.

I started from the fingertips using the circle cast-on and used the Finnish 2+2 f2 stitch to make these. My mother sent me some measurements which helped me to estimate the size. My dad has enormous hands so I didn’t want to make these too small. When I got to the thumb, I was just visiting my parents, so I was able to measure the size of the thumb opening I needed to leave.

The yarn I used was this Finnish Saimaa that is made out of Finnish sheep wool. It was perfect for nålbinding as it felted easily. There was no problem of joining the numerous separate yarn pieces together with just rubbing them between my hands.

The mittens looked a bit boring when they were finished, so I made some simple embroidery with white and blue wool. I first stitched on two rows of white zig-zag and then threaded blue yarn underneath those white stitches.

Hopefully, these will keep my dad’s hands warm when sitting on the ice doing ice-fishing!

I still have more to learn about nålbinding. I want to learn the Russian way of doing nålbinding as I have some very vague memories of my grandmother doing it.

The potholders

I made these potholders as the first project before I started the legwraps project last year. I just couldn’t share it as these were going to be Christmas presents! The last time I used the floor loom was over two decades ago, so there was a lot that I had forgotten – not that I had ever known very much about weaving.

To make these potholders thick and insulating, I used several strands of the thick weft. The white narrower weft is macrame yarn my husband bought me by accident when I asked him to pick up some wool for my nålbinding projects. Apparently, my description wasn’t accurate enough and I got this thick macrame yarn that I had been storing for a while. Now I could finally use it.

Here is a short video of the project!

One could also use this technique to make a long table runner that would double as a potholder!

I kept these two for myself.

Funny thing is that to make these I had to buy the yellow weft. By weaving all the six potholders, I managed to get rid of the white macrame yarn, but as I had to buy a big bag of the yellow weft, I really didn’t gain any closet space! I guess I have to try to weave a rug at some point and use up the yellow weft.

I hope you liked this post. See you soon and happy sewing!

Katja