Blue Skies Over Nida by Donna Druchunas

Blue Skies Over Nida

Knitting
April 2015
Fingering (14 wpi) ?
40 stitches and 80 rows = 4 inches
in garter stitch
US 00 - 1.75 mm
200 yards (183 m)
5" (12.5 cm) long, 6" (15 cm) circumference
English

I’ve named these wristers for the quiet, relaxing beach town of Nida on the Baltic Sea. Unlike the other two coastal Lithuanian towns—Klaipėda which is the third largest city in Lithuaina, and Palanga which is a party resort—Nida is an oasis of peace and quiet.

At the far south end of the 60-mile-long sandbar called the Curonian Spit, which separates the Curonian lagoon from the Baltic Sea, Nida is close enough to the Kaliningrad region of Russia—a tiny piece of land stranded between Lithuania and Poland—to pick up a Russian signal on your cell phone.

With picture-perfect cottages, boating, walking trails in the woods and along the beach near the sand dunes, an annual jazz festival, and little museums and shops scattered around, this is my favorite type of vacation town. Even with its reputa- tion for being a nature resort, Nida is visited by over 300,000 tourists every summer, so for a quiet retreat, it’s best to go in late spring or early fall.

Many of the beaded wrist warmers that I saw in museum collections in Lithuania are made with two or more colors of yarn knit in stripes. Sometimes the colors are changed randomly after only two or four rows, and sometimes an even stripe pattern is knit with two, three, or four different colors. In this design, I chose two shades of blue—a color used frequently in Lithuanian National Costume recreations by Anastazija Tamošaitienė. I aligned the stripes with the change in direction of the diagonal lines in the bead patterning.