Dew Drops Mitts; a Coordinating Contrast mitten pattern

The Dew Drops Mitts designed by Justyna Lorkowska have flowers growing from the wrist ribbing. I love organic decorations that include fitting practicalities! Check out her Ravelry Group too, she has more lovely designs to explore.

One practicality I haven’t addressed yet is how much yarn to you need to buy with this coordinating contrast business. You are already choosing patterns based on yarn size (all sport weight, or all dk, or all worsted) but some mittens are longer than others, the more cables, appliques, embroideries or ornamentation, the more yarn you need, so you can’t just use the yarn requirements from one of the patterns and be sure you won’t run out. What to do? Hopefully the patterns you are interested in have yardage suggestions on them, not just how many skeins of yarn to buy (checking my own listings, did I list yardage or just how many skeins to buy? Phew! I did.) OK. Average the yardages, add about 10% and you will be fine.

You should be so fine you’ll have a little extra to trim another project or to make an exploratory swatch. If total skeins is all that is listed, look up the particular yarn mentioned in the pattern, see how many yards are in that kind or yarn, and use that for your yardage.

You really want to have slightly more yarn than just enough or not enough, because it’s a pain to track down the same dye lots of yarn a month or two after your lys runs out, and you do want the same yarn in your coordinating contrast mittens, otherwise the contrast overwhelms the coordination.


The Dew Drops Mitts would work well with the Holly Mittens.

Holly and Ivy with tea
With coordinating contrast mittens, you have to buy twice the patterns, but since you don’t get bored making the second hand, you make the second hand.

And as someone who sells patterns, I can’t say I have any problem with you buying more of them 😉

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