Weird And Wonderful Gloves

In the last month, I've made a couple of sweaters. One crocheted, the Icelandic Turtleneck Pullover from the Crochet Me book, and one knitted, Tubey from Knitty.com. (I still haven't got FO pics yet. Bad, bad yarndancer!) Oh, and the Back To School U Neck Vest from Fitted Knits, which I did for Vestuary, and have actually managed to blog about already. I wanted to keep going, and make more garments, but I think all that productivity wore me out a little, and I just couldn't decide on what to make. There were a few days where I just sat on ravelry and looked through patterns, unable to make a decision. It ended up I wasn't knitting anything at all, just looking at patterns. I guess I was kind of burned out. I want to do more colourwork as well, but I really don't need gloves or hats at the moment (the weather's actually been quite nice and spring-like here), and I don't feel like committing to a full colourwork sweater just yet. Come to think of it, does anyone out there have any ideas for stranded colourwork patterns that aren't hats or gloves? I may need to go browse ravelry for that too, lol!

Anyway, I got my knitting mojo back when I saw the "#06 Gauntlets of Regret" pattern by Shiri Mor, while browsing ravelery. Sure, it's gloves, but they're pretty, funky gloves, not big functional ones. :) So I made two pairs:




I made the sparkly ones first. They're made from a black yarn which has a pink lurex thread plied around it. I like my sparkly yarn!! Then I thought I would make some plain black ones like the original pattern.

They knit up quite quickly, and by the 2nd pair, I had the pattern pretty much memorised. It's easy to change the pattern to account for gauge issues - I cast on the 2nd size number of stitches for the finger cuff, but kept going on in pattern till I had the very largest number of stitches for the wrist cuff as I think my row gauge must have been different. Either that or I have wonky sized hands!!

Then, while I was at the Princess Farhana workshops, I saw a dancer who was wearing long armwarmers which were bright orange. Being the knitting geek I am, I surreptitiously checked them out, and they weren't just straight stocking stitch like I thought they were at first, they actually had rows of ribbing at various points to hold them up. Well, I wanted them! So I got home, looked in my stash and found some bright orange acrylic. But I guess I'm still a little dubious about wearing colours that are too bright, so I decided to make the rib stripes a different colour, navy. I think it turned out good!




Yes, the orange actually is that bright!!

I used worsted weight acrylic on 4.5mm needles. The original ones were made of quite thin yarn, probably fingering weight, and were definitely machine made, so mine turned out quite different, but I think I prefer mine! No generic shop bought armwarmers for me! :)

They're pretty easy to figure out how to make them from the pictures, but I'll be writing up a pattern anyway. Who knows, maybe someone else out there wants armwarmers that can blind people!