Notes From the Studio: Developing No-Float Nordic-Style Mittens

If there’s one thing designing teaches you, it’s this: the pretty photos at the end never show the pile of yarn spaghetti behind the scenes.

Right now I’m deep in the middle of developing my new No-Float mitten patterns — inspired by the beautiful structure of traditional Nordic-style mittens — and I can tell you honestly… there’s a lot of frogging going on.

The basic idea sounds simple enough in theory: take the No-Float colourwork I already use for hats and apply it to mittens. Mittens are small, neat, structured, and they look like the perfect canvas for motifs. But every time I tweak the shaping, or shift a motif one stitch left or right, the whole look changes. And unlike hats, mittens have to fit a hand, which means I can’t just rely on stitch counts or tidy maths — I have to try them on, stretch them, scrunch them, and see how they behave in the real world.

So yes, I’ve frogged… a lot. And I’ll frog again.

But here’s the thing: this is the part of designing I secretly love. Because somewhere in between the false starts and the “nope, absolutely not” moments, something clicks. The fabric suddenly lies the way it should. The motif begins to sit just right and I feel like I'm making something that wants to be worn!

Getting there takes time.
It takes testing.
It takes a whole lot of pulling back stitches and starting again.

But that’s the beauty of it — every version brings me one step closer to the idea I had envisioned in my head!

And when it finally clicks (because it always does), the mittens will feel as effortless for you to make as they do for me to design — even if there’s a mountain of frogged yarn behind the scenes that made it possible.