Based on a traditional Belarusian motif these wrist warmers have a crocheted edging.

Three colors are used. One 25g ball of Shetland Spindrift for each although the entire ball will not be required, especially for the tertiary color.

JANUARY 2017

Somehow it seems appropriate to re-publish this pattern at this time. I’ve created a PDF that includes an essay about textiles in Belarus and a stitch library of colorwork charts, as well as the pattern for these beautiful wristers.

The West may know Belarus, a country roughly the size of Kansas sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania, as the setting for the 2008 film Defiance, as the recipient of the brunt of the fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, or through the December 2010 performance in London’s Young Vic Theatre of Zone of Silence—two plays by the underground Belarus Free Theatre highlighting the intolerable prohibition of free speech by the “last dictatorship.”

When I met my first friends from Belarus in a Lithuanian language course at Vilnius University, they told me what was special about America is our freedom. Right now, as freedom and democracy are under attack in the USA, more than ever, we must fight to make that statement true.