gloves – eternal magpie

Pseudo Sunday

Today is one of those days when I’m extremely grateful to be able to work part time. The fibromyalgia and the endometriosis have got together, and invited some germs round to play. As a result I’m sitting on the sofa wrapped in a quilt, scoffing painkillers, doing a bit of very simple knitting, and falling asleep every five minutes. Not an ideal state of being for welcoming visitors to a museum.

To make the germs a little less welcome, I’m drinking Earl Grey tea sweetened with this incredible bright green honey! A friend brought it back from a trip to Italy, and the colour is from eucalyptus. That means it soothes and eases congestion in one go, and the flavour works amazingly well with the already-fragrant Earl Grey.

During the brief moments I’m awake, I’m plotting a knitting pattern for a new pair of mittens. Tight fitting cuffs, quite long, to keep the wrists warm. A row of holes for a pretty ribbon. I need to knit a test pair, during which I can make up the rest of the details as I go along – and then try and make a second one to match. Now the weather’s decided that it’s autumn, I’m definitely going to need some new gloves for those early mornings at the bus stop.

More Marvellous Mittens

I had grand plans for making lots more pairs of gloves today. Above, you can see the total sum of my glove-making endeavours.

Admittedly I got rather sidetracked this morning by a hat, and didn’t start making the gloves until after lunch. Unfortunately, it turns out that making gloves from organic cotton pointelle is the most enormous pain in the backside. It’s very thick and very stretchy. It’s difficult to mark, and it’s difficult to cut and sew accurately. All of this makes working with it very slow going indeed.

I’ve prepared the backs and the bias tape for two more purple pairs, and cut the contrast stripes for three more pairs. Those will be teamed with more pointelle but in brown.

However frustrated I might be by the length of time it’s taking me to sew these, I have to admit that I rather like them! The bias trim (which is also around the thumbs) is a pleasing finishing touch, and I’m happy that all of the fabric is organic cotton. Now I just need to get a move on, and finish making them!

Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Marvellous Mittens

Ta-daa! A glove that actually fits onto my disembodied hand! I spent most of Saturday making the left glove, which involved a lot of fiddly seams, unpicking things, wonky elastic, and a certain amount of swearing. Once I’d got the left glove worked out though, the right one came out lovely! So this first pair will be mine, to wear and to display on the very shiny hand.

Once I was happy with the first pair, I cut out all the pieces for another three. (Pairs, not gloves.) I have plenty of this pretty floral jersey left over, but I’ve used up all of the lace edging, so future pairs will have a different trim. By the end of Saturday afternoon I’d managed to sew up six little thumbs, with the rest set aside for today.

And here they are, finished and packaged – three more pairs of fingerless gloves ready for the Frome Steampunk Extravaganza!

I have plans for some slightly more “masculine” (by which I simply mean “less frilly”) fingerless gloves to go alongside these. I have some gorgeous organic cotton pointelle fabrics in brown and purple, which should go perfectly with cuffs made from the remnants of the organic cotton stripes I used for the bow ties. I’m going to make a start on those tomorrow, so watch this space…

Prototype Gloves

Well, they fit, but only because I happen to have very small hands!

They’re made from polar fleece which, it turns out, isn’t really stretchy enough for gloves – not ones as fitted as these, anyway. I’m very pleased with the shape at the top (tall over the fingers and cut away underneath), although the placement of the curve needs a little alteration so that the little finger doesn’t disappear. The decoration on the cuffs also needs re-thinking. On auto-pilot I put the centre of the braid in the centre of the cuff piece, without thinking that this would cause it to end up hidden on the inside of the wrists. Oops.

I’ve never made gloves before, and it turns out that they’re very fiddly, especially parts like the thumb which obviously can’t fit over the free arm of the sewing machine. I am pleased with the way the thumbs have come out though – they’re the right height, and they fit really nicely around the base. Next time I think I’d change the order of the construction and attach the cuffs before sewing up the side seams. That would have made the top stitching in particular a lot easier!

Perhaps most frustratingly of all – my disembodied hand arrived last week, and I was so looking forward to displaying my first glove on it… but they’re so tight that they won’t stretch far enough to fit. Damn!

This is what I’ve been up to:

I hope this doesn’t spoil a surprise for anybody whose gift hasn’t arrived in the post yet, but this is why I’ve been a little bit busy and stressed out over the past few weeks.

There’s only one item missing from the photo call, and that’s a hat that I knitted for Paul, mostly in the middle of the night. I ended up resorting to knitting it inside a carrier bag, when he arrived home earlier than I’d expected from his work leaving do! (Thankfully he was slightly drunk and far too tired to wonder what on earth I was doing.)

Most of these are gifts that I gave, but a few were things that I made to be given as gifts by other people.

Oh, and I did finish Bryan’s second sock, but I forgot to take a picture of the pair before I wrapped them up!

Slither

Last night I started knitting the Slither gloves, from Knitty.

Today I will mostly be unravelling them, and starting again. Wah!
(I made a mistake right at the beginning of the stripes, dammit.)

The pattern is marked as “tangy”, which is not really very complicated in the great scheme of things. The particular difficulty with this pattern is that you’re doing three things at the same time.

Decrease every sixth row; repeat twelve times.
Change colour every eighth row; repeat ten times.
Make a buttonhole on the third row of every colour change.

Given my current inability to remember what day it is, I can’t keep all of that lot in my brain and knit at the same time. So, I have made myself a handy chart, writing out the rows in blocks of two stripes at a time. I’ve simply numbered the rows, 1-16 in five columns, and I’ve written “dec” or “butt” on the appropriate row, to remind me that I have to do something other than just keep knitting.

Now I just need to keep track of which row I’m working on, and everything will be fine!

The pattern and the image above are © Veronica O’Neil. She also has some handy hints and comments about the pattern on her blog!

Tag: gloves

Pseudo Sunday

Like this:

More Marvellous Mittens

Like this:

Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Marvellous Mittens

Like this:

Prototype Gloves

Like this:

This is what I’ve been up to:

Like this:

Slither

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: