Knitting has progressed in fits and starts, with judicious periods of ripping.
The wrist-warmers have been moving along rather quickly, given the limited amount of time I have devoted to knitting them. I did eagerly stay up one night determined to finish the top hem only to be disappointed in the end result.
They did not look better in the morning:
The problem was with the way the opening flared out at the fingers. It was not attractive and it felt bulky when they were on the hand. I checked the pattern and I had correctly followed the directions. I also checked the Vogue Knitting website to see if any corrections had been posted, but there were none.
Then I ripped and redid the hem.
According to the pattern, the hem at the wrist end was knitted over 44 stitches and then the number of stitches was increased to 66 stitches after finishing the hem. When it came time to make the hem at the finger end, the total number of stitches had already been decreased to 60 stitches, but it still looked like too many stitches were on the needle for the hem. So on the first row of the hem I simply repeated a K1, K2tog sequence around the circumference of the glove, ending up with 40 stitches. Then I knit the hem with and turned it up, sewing the live stitches to the beginning of the hem stitches on the inside. This was much better.
When I looked at the instructions for picking up the thumb stitches, it looked to me like I was going to have the same problem. I had 10 stitches on the holder and I was to pick up and knit 14 more stitches for a total of 24. This looked too bulky to me, but I wasn't sure I wanted to decrease the number of stitches by 1/3 to 16. I cheated a little bit and knit two stitches together twice on each needle, reducing my stitch count from 8 on each needle to 6 on each needle and a total stitch count of 18. This worked beautifully. I probably could have gotten away with 16 stitches also.
Here is the finished wrist-warmer on my hand. The fit is much better.
They turned out very well - you're clever to have thought of how to fix them. I'm not sure I would've know what to do...
Posted by: scotty | Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 08:56 AM