I am so very proud of these mitts.
When I accidentally came up with the Kiss Stitch, I looked at it and immediately knew it had to be a pair of mitts.
I was using this yarn to swatch and I could see that the stitch definition was just what the pattern needed. BFL has that wonderful clarity without being too harsh, and that’s just what this stitch needs.
I wanted to keep the overall look dainty and feminine, so I opted for a picot hem at the wrist. I first saw this technique in person at Beautiful Knitters in Pimlico, which I visited after seeing the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. (What a great day that was!) I’d been waiting for the right project to use it on ever since.
If you remember how I came up with the stitch – via the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph “seba” – it seems quite poetic that these two design elements, tangentially linked by me thinking about an ancient civilisation, ended up together here.
I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though. The picot hem was reminding me of period adaptations: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women. I thought about how these films always seem to have magnificent knitwear – shawls, mitts, and sometimes hats – and how this dainty edging seemed at home in those settings.
It didn’t take long for me to start thinking about Wuthering Heights. It’s one of my favourite books and I was lucky enough to visit the location used for my favourite adaptation, East Riddlesden Hall, a couple of years ago on the way back from Yarndale.
Of course I ended up watching the adaptation while I was knitting, and soon the two were forever linked in my mind. I find that happens while I’m knitting – when I pick up a project, I remember what I was doing or watching last time I was working on it.
Riddlesden didn’t sound feminine enough as a name for these mitts, so instead I chose Keighley, the town it’s in.
Keighley
Knitting • 4-ply • £5
Prounced KEITH-LEE, Keighley is a town in Yorkshire. It’s home to East Riddlesden Hall, a filming location in the heart of Brontë country that crops up time and time again in period film and television. These mitts are so named for those adaptations, which are so often crammed with beautiful examples of handknits.
