Completed Fingerl;ess Mittens

I suppose I should start this post with five important things you should know.

1. It is extremely hard to both use your hands to model mittens while simultaneously photographing them.

2. These mittens are hand made from the yarn up. I am afraid spinning is a practice I am still working at. I am not great at it.

3. I knit better than I spin, but often I knit late at night when I have time and am half asleep. Because during the day I have homesteader work to do. So the knitting is also imperfect.

Satu, and some yarn in the process of being spun.


4. I am not an Etsy shop. Nor am I a pro. I am just a homesteader that sometimes has some extra self made homestead crafts to sell. I don’t know too much about photography or lighting. I am also worthless in relation to fashion. As I spend my days playing with seed starting dirt, feeding animals, out in the garden, kneading bread, foraging the woods, or any number of other common homestead activities. If you want Etsy, go buy there. If you like my adventures in homesteading and in life on a homestead… Support is always appreciated as it allows me to have even more adventures and it helps to feed my very spoiled animals. Either way, my animals will continue being spoiled so please don’t take this point as a guilt trip. It isn’t one. Just an explanation for my failings.

5. These mittens are very very simple and very very rustic. They also don’t match on any level. All of the yarn used in the first one comes from the same ball of multicolored yarn used for the second. Though again even there they don’t quite match as I am not always the most attentive spinner. The second mitten also has at the very top edge by the fingers a little grey and white hand spun alpaca yarn. I ran out of the colorful stuff. Sorry. It happens fairly often that I miscalculate. In which case like a homesteader, I substitute something else to finish what I am making. Usually something available and easy to grab. I tend to cook and knit I suppose the same way in this respect…. Oh out of almond milk I still need a quarter cup of milk?! Well, let’s see what the goats have got for me… This is just the life of a homesteader. Always patching in a bit of substitute. Always grateful when a project holds together and functions for utilitarian purposes. This is just the nature of homesteading. In the end what tends to get create tends to be rustic, simple, and super unique.

A bobbin of yarn for this project that will get spun together with a second bobbin of single ply from this fiber, into two ply yarn.


Now that these truths are out of the way…. Let me tell you the story of these mittens.

Once upon a time, a homesteader dropped by a shop in a nearby town that sold wool from local sheep and alpaca. Sometimes she barters sometimes she buys. What she really would like are her own sheep. But till she gets some…. She gets her wool in other ways. The wool was beautiful and a natural fiber dyed beautiful and rich colors all fluffed in a bag on the shelf. The homesteader was blown away by the swirls of color. Then off to the left was this nice Alpaca wool. Which tends to be rather soft and this stuff did not disappoint.

Spun into 2 ply yarn, this stuff is not as consistent as a more experienced spinner might make. But it is unique and interesting.


Before arriving to the shop the wool grew over several months on living animals that roamed a barn yard. Then it was sheered off, collected, cleaned, colored, and carded and finally packaged for purchase. It was dropped off by a local farmer at the shop the homesteader gets her wool. The rest of the story you already know.

A work in progress.


I bought the wool brought it home. I spent copious hours with my dear friend Satu., my sweet little antique Ashford spinning wheel. Together over a nice chunk of time, we first spun one bobbin full of wool then another and then two more with the alpaca. The next step is to spin it in the opposite direction to create a 2 ply yarn. This is where most people then unwind it winding it onto a niddy noddy, creating a skein that they tie  in place and then twist into the shapes you frequently find skeins of yarn in. After that, comes washing the yarn which is basically running it through the water in the sink. You do this carefully or you end up with more of a giant hunk of felt. It helps to relax the yarn which has usually a bit of kink. In the case of these mittens I forewent these two steps. Mainly because wrapping the niddy noddy properly upsets my dyslexia and drives me bonkers. Instead I just rolled it into a ball, kink and all.

The next step took several days and again several hours. I cast stitches onto my needles. You are picturing 2 needles? That’s cute. these were actually knit on 4 needles, the stitches resting three, the fourth gradually picking them up only to be left with a new empty needle and the stitches still spread around 3 needles. I moved on to take the stitches from the next needle and so on. Round and round I knit with 4 knitting needles. Hour after hour, late into the night. Over the course of several days fitting in my knitting time whenever I could make time available for this project. It deserves to be noted bigger projects take far longer. This is a cute small project yes time intensive, but not compared to many projects done with knitting needles.

Trying to model these and photograph them on my hands at the same time is actually maddening.


One of the key foundational factors of homesteading is that you are constantly developing new skill sets. I am still in the phase of making art yarn. In that, the yarn I make is not generally perfect. Some of it is more tightly spun, some a bit woolier in places, some spots can be thick others very thin. In general, the yarn for these was a bit on the thin size for my needle size and the pattern, which means, it isn’t stitched quite as densely as something made from perfect store bought might be. In places it might even have an almost lace like effect. This makes my yarn extremely unique. You can’t buy something like this anywhere. These mittens are extremely and extroardinarily unique. One of a kind.

Words that come to mind to describe these mittens include, rustic, homespun, unique, unusual, simple, imperfect, labor of love, one of a kind. You may never see anything quite like them again.

Easier to photograph them on the counter in the kitchen rather than on my hand out in the greenhouse.


This weekend, they will be added to the shop. The price will probably seem outrageous, but it covers what I spent on the wool and at the price point I will have made less than $5 an hour working on these. So, the price is truly not particularly high even if it might initially seem so. What I make from this sale (if they sell,) will be spent on a sealant for the wood for the new behive we will be setting up this spring. It will buy hay for the goats and feed for the chickens. If anything is left after that it will be turned over into some more wool for another pair of fingerless mittens or some other project that can help fund the fix of the tractor which we will need to clean up the garden before I start planting my babies in the greenhouse outside. I craft as much as I can and when I have time. But my animals and plants must always be first priority.

I hope you have enjoyed the story of the fingerless mittens. We will get them into the shop as soon as we have a moment to post them there.

What do you think of the alpaca edge substitution? I ran out of the other yarn….


Knitting and spinning are quiet reflective times…. Gentle soft times, almost meditative. They are not loud and boisterous. To do what I do, times like that are truly treasured moments.

Thank you for reading
Will get these up as soo0n as possible.
Amanda Of Wildflower Farm