Is there a nicer knitter than a Fin?

*If you found this post by googling, please see this post for the finished Finnish Mittens: right here

When I'd gone as far as I could go with the Finnish Mitten instructions, I wrote to three different sources for help.

I wrote to the original company. No response.

I wrote to the Yarn Harlot. Very kind, albeit brief response (since she's in the middle of a North American book tour and all) helping me out with the braid on the mittens.

I picked a random Finnish knitter who had a blog in both English and Finnish. I read Lene at Dances with Wool, so she would have been the obvious choice, but at the time, she was still away on a trip. So I picked a blogger referenced in the comments section back on the Harlot's blog. She blogs under the name Ziina. She agreed to look over the pattern and my feeble attempt at translation. I sent her the most recent version (which included the braided part I'd already had help with) and she sent it back to me this morning with corrections. She also agrees that the picture doesn't match the directions and that there should be four flowers on the mitten cuff. She does warn us that the needle size might be a little small--she recommends not dropping back down to size 1 when we get to the palm as it might make the mittens too small. (We translated the needles as sizes 1 and 2, it may be that they should have been 2 and 3.) I'm not too, too worried as if they're too small for me, they'll probably make a perfect Christmas present for Jill (don't get your hopes up though, girl--if they fit me I'm keeping them ;). I'll want to do this pattern again anyway once I get more of the kinks worked out in the whole colorwork process.

I forwarded the corrected directions to Charlotte. I can't believe how much time and trouble Ziina has saved us :) Thank you, Ziina!