If you follow me on twitter and are up late, you probably heard about the girl gloves. I made a pair of fingertube gloves for a friend. From swatching to all-finished-except-ends-woven-in, I've taken photos of the whole process; 73 photos in all.
I can't believe I finished a whole pair of gloves (and I had to do them over a couple times) before I even got ONE blog post in. Craziness. There is no way that I'm going to get all the posts I have written in my head about these gloves written in real life any time soon (I still have 4 steek posts' worth of photos waiting!), so here's the Readers Digest version of girl gloves.
Take a deep breath ... OK!
The yarn I used, which was chosen based on it being DK weight and the requested Navy/Magenta combo, was Bambool in Color 12, and Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK in Color 18018. I loved working with both of these yarns.
I bought these needles for this project, and I adore them! The birch is very light and strong.
All of the gloves in our house had a ribbed cuff that was doubled. I vaguely remember seeing a glove pattern that had you make a doubled-rib cuff. So I made the cuff twice as long and I was going to fold it under and sew it into place.
It makes a super-awesome, fluffy, and draft-proof cuff. But the recipient ended up liking the long cuffs, which are equally draft-proof tucked up in your coat sleeves, so I didn't fold them under in the end. The cuff is a 1x1 rib.
The ribbing on these gloves was much stretchier and much smaller than the rib on the
man gloves. I think it has to do with the yarn; the man gloves are a bulky weight wool that doesn't have much give. After the ribbing, I increased a couple of stitches on the thumb-side of the glove.
When I got to the thumb, I made a vertical slit by casting on stitches above the stitches I skipped. The skipped stitches were kept live on the white bit of thread.
Back of the hand view.
Putting the live stitches on the needle and using my crochet hook to pick up stitches along the non-live-stitch edges to start the fingertube for the thumb.
Foundation row of the thumb's fingertube.
Thumb's fingertube done!
Here the first finger's fingertube is complete and I'm starting the middle finger's fingertube. The foundation row is a combination of live stitches from the hand and cast on stitches between the fingers. After the first fingertube, I used my crochet hook to pick up stitches between the cast on stitches of the previous fingertube so the space between fingertubes was automatically closed.
Woo hoo! And, for those of you counting along, that's 10 uses of "fingertubes." Ha!
I didn't use a pattern. I just made a gauge swatch and made it up as I went based on my hand measurements. I loved doing the two color stripes. I should have taken a photo of the twisted yarns on the inside from the color changes. They were so pretty. Color work is fun!
Oh, and since I was knitting in the round, the stripes are a tiny bit offset at the color changes, but I put them along the pinky-edge of the gloves and I'm 100% sure no one will ever notice it. Well, 98% now that I mentioned it in a blog post. I mean, unless you're karate chopping someone in the face, would they ever see the pinky-edge of your hand? And, in that circumstance, I bet the tiny stripe-jog in your fingertube gloves would be the last thing you're worried about.
ELEVEN.