As I mentioned in my last post about these gloves, I started these gloves about 6 months ago.  I was fresh off my own pair of turtleneck gloves and I was curious about how to avoid the holes that appear on either side of the thumb when you pick up the stitches for the thumb tube.

I had the holes on the girl gloves, but I thought it was because I was a newbie knitter.  Then, when they appeared on my turtleneck gloves (see the photo below), I realized that the way I was picking up stitches was stretching the other stitches in a way that made it impossible to avoid the holes.

Well, there must be a better way.  Right?  I consulted the googles, which rewarded me with an avalanche of info:

waste yarn thumb trick
glove construction - fingers item 3a
avoiding holes thread, which lead me to ...
short row methods which melted my mind
casting on stitches in the middle of a project
and, glitten video around the 2:30 mark

With all this information fresh in my head, I wanted to make another pair ASAP and try some of these techniques out.  As luck would have it, Urban Craft, one of my fave commenters from the last couple of years, emailed asking me about them and I offered to make her a pair.

What I ended up doing was a mash up of several things I read about.  When I separate the thumb and palm stitches, I cast on 4 stitches near the thumb hole.  So the first mod is that I picked up a stitch on the other side of the column of stitches that runs along the thumb hole.  See it there on the left?


Second, I picked up stitches on the glove IN BETWEEN the stitch columns of the glove.  Does that make sense to you?  So, basically, I picked up an extra stitch because I picked up 5 on on the outside and inbetween each of the 4 cast on stitches.

  Here is the last picked up stitch, which is around the outside of the right-side column of stitches around the thumb hole.

This totally worked to keep away the holes, but on my next pair of gloves, I'm going to try = crossing the previous row's stitches at the point where the gloves meet the thumbtube.

Do you have any other tips for avoiding that hole?