Give Those Hands Some Gloves!

 I decided that after 25 years in knitting, it was time to knit gloves and knit them for my kid.

Step one was to trace a hand and take all the appropriate measurements that are needed for a fitted glove.  I then turned to two of my tried and true resources. My two books of reference were Mary Thomas’s Book of Knitting (Dover Press) and an old article from a Threads Magazine book when Threads actually had knitting articles. The good news is that there are still used copies of this book floating around that can be snagged on Amazon. But the book that was the biggest help of all was Ann Budd’s book The Knitter’s Handy Bookof Patterns. This book was invaluable to me. I highly recommend it. 

                                            The Diagram

I would use this diagram with my daughter's hand measurements to plan and to check my knitting as I went along.  The hand length and finger length were the biggies for me.

Glove Notes

·       Taking an accurate gauge is the trick to having gloves that fit (seems to be true about anything in knitting that needs to fit).

·       I worried about having holes between the fingers during the set up row.  I solved this by actually casting on more stitches than I needed.  On the next round I would K2tog as needed to get back to the correct number.  This step solved the problem and is not noticeable. Or at least I don’t think it is. This is just one of many tips that Ann has in her book about knitting gloves. 

There are a lot of free glove patterns out there. Pages and pages can be found on Ralvery alone. I have just lately downloaded a free glove collection from Interweave. They have many “a gratis” eBooks.  

Happy Knitting!