This project hasn't gone quite the way I planned at multiple stages, from the uneven yarn to the gloves that were a bit too tight in the fingers. After wearing them through one winter, I decided to alter them into flip top mitts, but I'm still not entirely sure they are fitting right. I will go over all of the details of each step of the making process below. The yarn was spun in the fall of 2019, the gloves were knit in the winter/spring of 2020, and the mitt conversion process was completed in April 2021.
[Image description: A photograph of a white person's hands wearing flip top mitts. The mitts are knit in a gradient yarn moving from dark brown at the wrists, to medium dusty blue at the hands, and bright green at the fingers. The mitt top is flipped up over the left fingers, and flipped down on the right hand. The finger cuffs are visible on the right hand, which is holding a tiny terra cotta pot with a small succulent growing inside. Both mitts have an intricately detailed cable pattern that flows from the ribbing at the wrists, up onto the mitt top over the fingers. The backdrop for the photograph is a medium brown wooden laminate floor.]
[Image description: A photograph of a person wearing gloves, resting one hand on top of the other. The gloves are roughly gradated from dark brown at the wrists, into blue, ending with a vibrant green at the fingers. The backs of the gloves have an intricately detailed cable pattern. Several small hand wound balls of the same yarn are resting at the person's fingertips.]
I initially purchased the fibre, a 120 g dyed blend of camel and silk of unknown ratio and origin, from a local destash. Because of the luxury blend, I knew I wanted to use it for something next to skin. I settled on gloves, which are something I use quite a lot given my circulation issues, and I had stumbled across a stunning glove pattern, Meisi by Julia Mueller (these are only available on Ravelry, so I will not link them here). If Ravelry is accessible to you, I highly recommend looking through her pattern catalogue - she is a very talented designer, and she decided to make all of her patterns available for free after some changes with the EU and taxes. I wanted to create a gradient yarn, so I decided to strip the fibre into piles of green, green/blue, blue, blue/brown, and brown, and then spin and chain ply two matching skeins.
[Image description: A photograph of a coiled braid of fibre, resting on a plaid fabric background. The fibre is variegated in shades of green, to blue, to brown. The fabric in the background is in faded earthy tones of beige, brown, green, and dark red.]
Unfortunately, due to perhaps my overall level of skill or my lack of experience with chain plying, one of my skeins was noticeably thicker than the other, and both skeins were a heavier weight than I had intended - neither were comfortably in the fingering weight range. I reasoned that knitting at a tight gauge would be acceptable for gloves, and I thought I might be able to compensate for the difference in weight by knitting with different sized needles (I planned to use a 2.0 mm and 2.25 mm). I also needed to make the gloves a bit smaller than the smallest size, in order to accommodate the thicker yarn and my small hands, so I found places in the cable chart where I could remove stitches without changing the overall look of the cables.
Knitting such a dense fabric was tough on my hands, but I did manage to make two matching gloves in the end. I did have to rip back a few times to alter the fit, as I am pretty picky about having gloves that are bit a snug. I hate loose gloves. I wore them for about a year, but I started noticing an issue with the circulation in my fingers. I have a number of health issues, and may be developing Raynaud's syndrome (thankfully I live in a pretty mild climate for Canada, or this would be a lot worse). The thickness of the fabric on the fingers of the gloves meant that there was just enough bunched up fabric right in between my fingers that it felt like it was restricting the circulation of my fingers. Knitting the fingers a bit bigger wouldn't help, because it seemed to be more about the thickness of the fabric, rather than how tight it was. I had put so much work into these gloves at this point that although I was frustrated, I was determined to make them work for me. I decided to convert them into flip top mittens. After some consideration, I decided to leave the finger cuffs, rather than just have one opening for all of my fingers. Although I was risking not actually fixing the issue with circulation, I wanted to take the chance, because flip top mitts are so much more comfortable if each finger has its own opening.
The conversion was fairly straight forward. I unpicked the ends for each finger, and ripped back to just before the division, then bound off with a stretching bind off. I then divided up my remaining yarn into two piles, so that I could match the gradient blend on each mitt. Then I picked up stitches along the back of the hand, and started knitting at that point in the cable chart, and cast on stitches for the front of the hand when I got around to the side. I knit on with the cable chart, decreasing where it seemed appropriate, and did a Kitchener stitch when I had six stitches remaining. I then duplicated this process on the other mitt.
I have worn them a couple of times, but the weather is now too warm for them. I have a sinking feeling that the finger cuffs are still restricting blood flow juuuust enough that my fingers will get very cold. I will hold off judgement until I go through another winter with them, and then I will make a decision on where to go from here. My options are to turn them into straight mittens, or to give them away to one of the little people in my life (my hands are quite small for an adult woman, so kids are really the only option for handing these down to someone). I have learned quite a lot and improved in my skills since I started spinning for this project, and I know that if I were to do this over again, I could do a much better job of achieving the product I wanted. But I don't regret pushing myself to try this ambitious idea, because that is how I continue to grow as a maker. Sometimes we learn the most from the things that don't work out quite how we envisioned.