The Columbia Mittens Beckon

“Please make some mittens,” I emailed desiger Star Athena in 2010 before I popped a skein of yarn in the mail to her. Visiting Jeanne and Dan Carver at Imperial Stock Ranch in eastern Oregon, I had picked up some lovely all-natural wool from the same flock that had dressed Olympic athletes and entrusted it to the designer. Star suggested designing something with cables, and I left her to work out the details on her own.

The mittens she sent me a few weeks later felt like a gift. The closed cable on each hand looks like a butterfly held out from open palms. The plain background fabric looks great in either textured woolen-spun or smooth worsted-spun yarn, and the cable pops out against the background. It’s been my favorite mitten pattern for years.

Star Athena’s design for the Columbia Mittens forms a completed motif when you hold your hands together with palms up. Photo by Joe Coca

Closed-Loop or Infinity Cables

The Columbia Mittens include an unusual type of cable. Where most cables flow in vertical columns from the cast-on to the bind-off, some cables seem to come out of nowhere. The cable stitches pop out from a ground of stockinette or reverse stockinette stitch, cross back and forth, and then disappear back again into the background. Motifs like this appear often in Celtic braided knot knitting.

To keep the background from puckering and create enough stitches for the cables, the pattern calls for increasing a few stitches at the start of the cable and decreasing them away after the motif is completed. With the motif completed, you can trace the edges of the cable in an infinite knot, and the traveling stitches enclose the space inside.

Click on an image below to view it in full-screen mode.

A Wool Revival

Since the design was released, the original yarn has become unavailable, but a new version may be even better. The Carvers’ ranch is now a member of the Shaniko Wool Company farm group, which brings together 10 family ranches from the American West in a fully traceable, sustainable, certified wool source. Knit Picks High Desert yarn line is made of 100% Merino/Rambouillet wool raised on one of these ranches.

Although it has a smooth worsted-spun texture instead of the nubbly woolen-spun construction of the original yarn, High Desert Worsted is the same weight. Editor Kate Larson sampled High Desert Worsted in a mock cable pattern. She loved the springiness and stitch definition, which made it shine in the Columbia Mittens pattern.

The Columbia Mittens feature a closed cable wrapped around the heel of the hand. The clever design comes to life on your hands. Photo by Matt Graves

A Question of Perspective

Since I first saw the Columbia Mittens, the placement of the cable motif has been one of my favorite things. Plenty of mittens have cables on the back of the hand, but few place them on the edge. Like a pattern along the side seam of an otherwise plain sweater, it strikes me as a delightful, unexpected detail, especially because two halves of the motif form a whole when you put your hands together, as though you’re cupping the cable in your palm.

I was puzzled when a sample knitter turned in a pair of these mittens, which she had worked in the new yarn, with the cable rotated to the back. The written pattern clearly gives directions to place the motif opposite the thumb, so I couldn’t figure out how the mistake was made. I was even more surprised when the photographs of my own blocked pair of the mittens came back a few months later, and I discovered that someone had carefully reshaped one of the mittens to make it look as though the cable ran along the back of the hand! It seems like some knitters would really like the motif to be visible in full on the back of each hand, rather than wrapping around it.

And if you prefer that orientation, go right ahead! For myself, though, I’ll keep putting my hands together for Star Athena’s clever design.

Subscribers can find the Columbia Mittens in the Farm & Fiber Knits Library.