These are Mimi Hill’s Flutter Butterfly mittens, knitted in Mimi’s own dyed fingering weight yarn. My only modification was to shorten the mitten some and that resulted in a less rounded top than the pattern provides. Hill’s pattern is available at her blog and via Ravelry. Her Rav name is Eskimimi.

Hill says she designed the mittens “to echo the recurring motif of a cloud of yellow butterflies surrounding the character of Meme and her lover in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude.”  I am not familiar with the book, but I do know something of butterflies. The back of the mittens begin near the cuff with nothing but flecks meant to evoke a cloud of butterflies seen from a distance. As the butterflies ascend to the tips of the mittens, what they are becomes more and more clear.  The palms of the mitten are nicely latticed. But best of all, open your right hand and on the palm is a big beautiful butterfly.

I was a tad concerned about whether my rusty colorwork skills would stand up to this pattern. It worked out just fine. Well, there is a rather prominent mistake that I didn’t notice until I was several rows beyond it. I ripped back, only to make the same mistake again so I figured it was meant to be. It’s near the cuff on the palm side with the butterfly–so I figure that beautiful butterfly is such a distraction that my mistake can be forgiven.