pumpkin gauntlets
I actually have many WIP which I haven't mentioned here or added to my WIPs sidebar... One of them is my very own design. It's a small foray into design though: gauntlets. I fondled some Debbie Bliss alpaca/silk DK at The Point , in a burned orange color (#4), and ended up buying 2 balls, without a specific project in mind. I've accumulated many twin balls of yarn, assuming that brilliant inspiration would strike me... But I digress.
This yarn will become... pumpkin gauntlets! 
While swatching, I came up with a few ideas:
-use smaller needles (US4, not the recommended US 6) so the fabric is nice and dense to protect my numb-from-the-cold hands
-throw in some cool cables pilfered from Teva Durham's Renaissance sweater (IK winter '02) - took me a while to figure those out, as I couldn't find a pattern for them in any of my knitting books. Let me just say it involves 9 st and 2 cable needles.
-make them as long as possible. Hey, if these reached my elbows, I'd be very happy. The apparent solution? Knit the gauntlets from the "fingers" up until I run out of yarn. (Not toe-up, fingers-up!). However, all glove/gauntlet/glove patterns are intended to be knit in the opposite direction (from the wrist down to your fingers). So how do I work my thumb gusset?! Normally, you to do paired increases, then put the thumb st on hold. I want to do it backwards, so with paired decreases. I grabbed some scrap yarn ( some Cotton Fleece left over from Teva Durham's Ballerina T) and tried doing a reversed thumb gusset. Here are details of that experiment:
- CO 10 st, work a few rows
- add the thumb gusset st : k5, k10 from a provisional crochet cast-on in purple yarn, k the last 5. Yes, this stretches out the interval between the 5th and 6th st; put it on a dpn if you want.
- Work a dec row: k5, k2tog, k to last 2 st fr prov CO, K2tog tbl, k5
- work 1 row even
- rep the last 2 rows until you are back to the original # of st (here, 10)
It works!!
Then I got carried away, and decided to do a picot hem, using Marnie McLean's no-sew hem. Well, I have the technique down pat, but it turns out it looks too loose. It's one of those things that becomes painfully obvious once you try it. Half of the gauntlet (covering the palm) will be worked in 1:1 ribbing, which obviously pulls in. If the hem is made in stockinette, it will be wider than the gauntlet. Duh. So I ripped and I will try my very first tubular cast on.
