Pretty and Real. And warm.

One of the blogs I used to read fairly regularly is Like Mother, Like Daughter, which is a mixture of domestic advice, crafting ideas, and reassuringly old-fashioned parenting guidance from two or maybe three generations of mothers and daughters (and therefore, possibly grandmothers) in one family.  Some members of the family home school; they garden assiduously and live fairly frugally, by which I mean that they make an effort to repair things that break, avoid buying new things, and make a lot of things themselves. They (or at least some of the team) are also very Catholic, more Catholic than my mother was, which I find interesting.  They have customs and faith traditions I have never heard of, which says some unflattering things about 1970s Catholic schooling, at least to my mind. I haven't read it frequently enough to sort out who the various names refer to, except for the darling baby, Pipo. It's worth paging through just to see his photos.

Anyway, the blog itself is beautifully designed, and they have a nice custom on Thursdays, called "Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real" where they publish photographs that fall into each of those categories. Some are decorations, some are of the garden, LOTS of them are of the aforementioned Pipo.  It's a nice 30-second distraction.  My photography skills are so poor, and my schedule is so chaotic at present that I could never undertake such a regular project but I do recommend checking it out.

But on the 'Pretty" and "Real" categories, here is something that caught my eye today:

Yarn Harlot (the worlds most famous knitting blogger - see my sidebar) has been on a mitten spree.  Aren't they lovely?  I have not attempted mittens but have made Lucy some gloves several years ago that matched her school uniform, and I made myself a set of fingerless gloves back in 2010. I want to try mittens, particularly I want to make some of the fabulous Latvian mittens that have been popular in knitting circles in the last few years. Like this:

or this:

Last year, Santa brought me (at my express direction) this book of Latvian knitting patterns.

It seems that Latvian girls traditionally knit themselves a hope chest of mittens, most of which were distributed to guests and helpers at their wedding. Some women in the book gave out over 80 pairs. Such beauty and generosity, and warm hands.