Sunday, February 17, 2008

to warm hands and my first frog

i often have cold hands. at work, at home, in general. i have tried to solve this by wearing gloves but there are a lot of things you can't do while wearing gloves - like typing on a keyboard - which i've tried many times at work and reluctantly decided that cold hands were better than one finger typing. this is why the idea of fingerless gloves excites me. my hands can be warm and i can still use my fingers? genius!

i don't know why i hadn't thought of it before and just bought some, but for some reason it didn't click until i saw this knitting pattern - 'fetching' - and i knew i had to learn to knit well enough to make them :) i know that most every knitter in the world has probably made these already but i hadn't and a lot of this was new to me... first ever cables, first ever gloves (even if there are no fingers they still intimidated me!)

so... i tried it out - i found some lovely turquoise-y yarn, figured out my gauge and cast on. turns out the cables were really fun, and i enjoyed the project immensely until i bound off and tried on the glove. this is what it looked like:

now, it's not awful, and the cables are really very pretty (i am still ridiculously proud of them), but overall, it just didn't work for me. the biggest problem was that the yarn was just too fine, so the glove was too thin, too small, and the shape didn't hold up very well (you can see it pulling all over and the top bind off is painful to look at).

i wasn't quite sure what to do. i knew i wouldn't wear it but i wasn't quite ready to *gasp* frog it. i've never undone anything i've knit before - the effort to get it to the point of existence has always been too high to even consider it. plus, with this one, the cables were so pretty, and they were my first ones!!

what i ended up doing was falling in love with another fingerless glove pattern: 'evangeline'. i decided to knit double stranded, got myself close to gauge, and cast on. immediately, it felt better. they were thicker, they held their shape better. in progress:

at this point, i am already in love. new, pretty cables start to emerge and i start to feel like i might be able to frog my fetching. but i don't, not yet.

i had to finish and make sure that this would turn out ok. not sure why - if it didn't turn out, what would i do? have two unhappy, unmatched gloves?

in any case, evangeline did not disappoint. i bound off glove #1 this morning and am oh so happy. i love it! it is pretty, the cables look like real cables, it fits, it feels nice, minimal weird pulling - yay!

as i type, i have one warm hand, and can't wait to finish this post so that i can cast on for glove #2... and frog fetching. what seemed so wrong before now seems necessary. sometimes you need to start over to get to a happy place. i do love my evangeline.

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