I have made myself lot of pairs of crochet gloves over the
years. Dragon-scale stitch rainbow woollens, merino wool overgloves (designed
to be big and loose and baggy, so I can wear them over sleeves of jumpers and
coats), and big fat fingerless hand warmers. I have made gloves for friends and
family, but never for David. He does like to complain that I never make him
anything, and I’ve never really had a good response.
He wears a lot of Velcro, which is a yarns nemesis. He doesn’t
like bright colours, unlike me. He hates fingerless gloves with a passion, but I
have never done close-finger gloves before.
Last year, after he broke and dislocated a knuckle, he was
told to wear fingerless gloves to keep the joint and muscles warm which would
help with recovery. I decided I would make him a pair of woollen gloves to keep
his fingers toasty. While we were away on holiday on the Isle Of Wight we fell
into an alpaca farms 'yarn barn', where I bought four balls of wool. A dark,
graphite grey. A blend of sheep and alpaca. Not too thin but not too chunky. It
had specks of blue in it. It wasn’t my first choice; I had actually picked up
some khaki greens, but David preferred the grey. I didn’t start making these
while we were away as I was frantically trying to finish my temperature
blanket.
I took the yarn and a
hook with me when I took Momma P to the open surgery at her doctors when she
was poorly sick – it gave me something to do while we were sitting. I started
with a foundation double crochet row (as I utterly HATE working into chains),
worked up a rectangle, measured it on Mommas arm, and decided it was far too
long and needed to be two thirds frogged. Undone. Ripped out. Gone. Oh well!
Such is life, and the joy of not using a pattern.
The aim was to do a rectangle in rows, and then fold it over
and stitch it up, leaving a thumb hole. This is a method I have done before for
gloves and arm warmers and it works quite well, especially for decorative stitches
that work better in rows rather than rounds. I did reverse DC – so a row of normal double crochet working right
to left as normal, putting the hook in from the front. The second row was 1ch
to turn, work right to left, but insert the hook from behind. The finished
effect is a flat piece worked in rows that doesn’t look as if it has been
worked in rows. It is fiddly to get the hang of, especially if the tension is
tight, but it does look good. When I finished the rectangles I also decided to
turn it inside out, so wrong-side facing. This is simply because the stitches
looked nicer and more textured on the back. I held them together with stitch
markers and measured them on Davids hands to get the thumb holes in the right
places. It was here that I realised that I would need to shape the rectangles
to better fit the hand, as there was a gaping corner on each one! I needed to
do this before doing the cuff. I quite literally did another row of DC, but I decreased
two stitches together three times on the side that needed pinching it. It worked
very well and was the right amount of shaping.
I had drawn around one of Davids hands on some paper so that when I did the finger tubes I could measure the length properly. I am not known for being accurate. I did the thumb tubes next, simply DC worked in rounds to the desired length.
Next up was the ribbed cuff where the glove fits snug onto
the wrist. I have made these before but had forgotten the technique so it took
a while to get into the swing of it. I made it on one glove, was a bit unsure,
got David to try the glove on, and realised I hadn’t done it right AT ALL – so that
was another thing to be frogged. Unfortunately I sew things a little too well
which meant I had to literally cut it off and rip the stitches out one by one.
I then redid the cuff, properly, and was much happier with the result.
To work out the spacings for the fingers, I put the glove on
my own hand and used stitch markers to segregate the fingers. Again, I did DC
in the round for each finger tube. This was also trial and error and I had to
redo some fingers as the tubes were too narrow and David couldn’t even get his
finger in it! Eventually I worked out the optimum number of stitches per finger
and got them done. I hate sewing ends away. Where possible I stitched over the
yarn tail but at the ends of each finger I had a huge tail that needed sewing.
A night on the sofa (under my temperature blanket) and I sat sewing.
Voila! The gloves were done. I wrapped them up and gave them
to David and he loves them. I don’t know what has happened to his stupid
fingers but despite the amount of measuring, trying, measuring again, adding
extra rows to fingers, making sure they were all the same length – it turns out
that his fingers are stupid and are all odd lengths. The gloves fit differently
on both hands and I didn’t want to sit and add more rows to the fingers. In the
end I sewed a stitch knot of red wool onto the back of the right hand so he
knows which glove goes on which hand!
I am very pleased how they turned out, considering I free-handed
it all. They are snug and cosy, and I know he wears them regularly at work. Maybe
though next time I’ll use a pattern.
