Uncharted Territory

Dear Mandella,

In an attempt to recover from the madness of this morning, I took a great leap into The Great Unknown: Knitting Gloves.

It started with a magnificent skein of Berocco Ultra Alpaca Fine (50% Peruvian Wool, 20% super fine Alpaca, 3o% nylon) in the Prune Mix colorway. It is luxuriously soft and gives me a sinfully sensuous feeling as I stroke the ball . . . (never mind). I started out by knitting socks with a pattern modified from the Kimono Shawl in the Folk Shawls pattern book. The pattern as it's stated in that book is 10+1 sts. I make it a 12 st pattern (I like balance when I'm knitting sock) with 2 iterations, then added 5 sts at the beginning and end for a rib. I'm knitting this with US 1 circulars and getting 8 sts/1" in stockinette.

All was going well, I was about 3/4 of the way through the second pattern repeat when I decided to slip it onto my hand to check how the design was coming out. That was when the softness of the yarn made me come over all whoozie and, after all of the craziness of this morning and this past week, I decided that I really needed to have these not as socks for my feet but gloves for my hands. Thus, I took the aforementioned flying leap.

I have been using Ann Budd's Knitter's Book of Handy Patterns in order to figure out the basic structure of glives. Of course, the increases for the thumb gusset comes first and I have only 10 of the 20-22 total I'll need. (Ann has it at 21 but that's because she starts with just one stitch increased at the end of the round before starting the thumb increases. I know where she's going with that, but I needed an even number in order to make the ribbing come out right. It's a long story.)


Did I think I didn't have enough stress in my life? Did I take this up because I anticipate a big drop in stress this week after several projects at my jobs are finished?

And it's not that the knitting is stressful. Here's what's making me kind of nuts:

1. The gusset increases are coming every 3 rounds, but the Kimono stitch pattern changes every 2 rounds. *sigh*
2. It's a pain in the arse to write down everything so that I can duplicate my method on the second one.
3. I'm really not even certain this is going to work.

Ah, well, that's where knitting is NOT like life. With knitting, you can rip it out and start over again. If you're lucky, you'll get some bad knitting day make-up sex, but I'm not that hopeful.

Before you can mention it, yes, the Kimono Scarf is still in progress. It's about 3/5 done. I haven't knit on it for a while because I've been working on other things. And doing laundry. And cleaning up "dog cookies."