Transitions Gloves

So, one of my resolutions for the new year is to post some more informative FO posts. Since this is primarily a knitting blog, that would probably be a good thing. right? 🙂

Here is my first finished object of 2009 – the Transitions Gloves from Shibui Knits.

Yarn used: Shibui Knit Sock yarn in colors Breeze (the pale blue) and Peacock (the dark blue-green) One skein of each (and I almost ran out of Breeze!)

Needles used: size 2.5 and 1.5 Knit Picks Harmony circular needles

Started 12/12/08
Finished 12/26/08 (but didn’t finish weaving in ends until January!)

I started out casting on a smaller number of stitches than the pattern called for, thinking that my wrists are so small that I needed to adjust the pattern. As I worked to the wrists, though, it turns out they were ending up much to small! So I had to frog the whole thing and start over, this time following the pattern as written.

In working the fair isle chart, I used the woven fair isle technique as illustrated at Philosophers Wool: two handed fair isle technique. This eliminated the floats on the inside of the gloves, which I thought would be ideal for gloves, where the floats can tend to get caught on fingers and rings. Here’s a shot of the inside of the gloves:

I followed the pattern pretty much to the letter, up to the knuckles. Then, I wanted partial fingers on these, instead of the open tube at the knuckles, so I changed it up to add in fingers. Here’s how I did that: when I got to the point at the base of my pinky, I put the end 14 sts on hold (for the pinky) and cast on 3 sts to bridge the gap across to join back to knitting in the round. I then knit a few rounds until I got to the base of my index finger. I then started working each finger – 7 sts on each side of the glove, and casting on 3 sts to bridge the gaps (or picking up 3 sts on the sides where a finger has already been worked.) I did a few rounds in the Breeze color, and then switched to the Peacock color to tip the fingers (since I knew I was running out of Breeze!). Here’s a shot of the fingers in progress:

Overall I am very happy with these! My only complaint is that the weather here has turned mild, and I haven’t had a chance to wear them!!!!