graduated gloves

Two finished objects in as many days! Remember the yarn I dyed in the graduated dyeing class last September?

I was determined not to let the yarn languish in stash for years upon end. Too many good memories were wound up in it! I cast on for gloves on November 12, 2012. Thank goodness for Ravelry, keeping track of all these details for me. The pattern, Treads, is divided into four distinct sections, so I thought it would be a good match for the four colors in the yarn.

It took a bit of manipulation at points, because the transitions between colors in the yarn didn't necessarily match up to the pattern stitch changes at every point.

When that happened, I sought out the point at which the color changed to the next one, and used a Russian Join to transition more subtly between the colors. I didn't do as well on the first glove, which is on the right in the photo below, but I was a little more anal about the second one.

I finished one glove with the truncated fingers per the pattern, but my husband questioned why I was making yet another pair of fingerless gloves. He was right! (But don't tell him I said that...) Enough of the lightest color was left to make full fingers, but at this point I put the gloves away. They marinated for almost a year. I stumbled upon the project bag while I was cleaning out my work room, and the coinciding change in the weather convinced me to pick up the project again.

Extending the pattern to make full fingers is easy enough, because the pattern already spells out how to form the base of the fingers. Just keep knitting until the tube is about a quarter inch shorter than your finger. The first decrease is roughly k1 k2tog around (don't worry if the stitch count doesn't work out exactly), then knit a plain row, then k2tog all the way around. You can do another row of k2tog if you want to make more of a point, or just thread the yarn through the remaining stitches and draw it tight.

My final decision was how to finish the thumbs. Green like the palm? Orange like the section next to where the thumbs would be? Tan like the fingers? I finally settled on green, because I thought it made the smoothest transition from the green yarn of the thumb gusset.

I highly recommend this pattern, which is very well written and comprehensive especially for a free pattern. The transitions between stitch patterns make it an interesting knit, and I loved learning how to knit a latvian braid, which forms the borders for the linen pattern stitch. That will definitely be a technique I use again.

Shout out to my buddy Terzo, who took these lovely pictures. My former photographer, Secondo, was out at the mall with his girlfriend. Time marches on... I figure I have about five more years of Terzo helping me out, then it's up to the dog to figure out how to press the photo button.