I’d been looking for an excuse to buy and try this alpaca yarn and I’m very happy with it - the yarn is super soft and very warm ( edit: when using the mittens, they lost a lot of fibre for the first few weeks - white fluff all over black jeans makes for an odd look :) )

This was my first project where I’ve tackled the stranded knitting by holding one yarn in each hand (I normally have them both in the left hand as a continental knitter). I was about halfway through the first mitten before I began to feel comfortable with this method and achieving a suitable tension. One thing that helped was realising that using a different type of hold in each hand helped the yarn to flow smoother.

I also figured out a few things about designing patterns for stranded mittens. I ripped out a few false-starts as I worked on the design, and this one has no need to catch floats because the longest section of any colour is 4 stitches (and that only occurs 8 times).