And a good mornin' guv'nor!

Sooo, I've put all my projects on a really brief hiatus while I work on some fingerless gloves. Autumn - winter, rather - has arrived all unannounced, and I cannot stand the cold. The gloves resulted from some beautiful sock yarn that I bought in Nelsonville. Who knew there was a good yarn store there?

Originally, I had bought the yarn to make a drapey wrap from Vogue's Spring/Summer 2006 issue. Except, I hadn't counted on the superwash wool to be so un-drapey. I got 3 skeins of Plymouth's happy feet in their varigated red. As much as I love luxury yarns, I realized I've been buying things that require hand washing. And that creates a need for a LOT of drying space. Which, of course, isn't always available. So yummy sock yarn it is! I thought the thin nature of the sock yarn would make it drapey. Yeah, that didn't work at all. I hadn't counted on the way the yarn fluffs up on itself.

Then, 2 days into the Giselle sweater pattern, the weather literally dropped 20 degrees. It went from being in the 70's to the 50's. Being the tropical bird that I am, I can't stand anything cold. Some digging around produced Bronte's mitts, which I have, of course, modified heavily. They're completely fingerless except for the thumb. I've changed it so that I can have fingers. I used another pattern as a guide for casting on the fingers. Maintaining the lace pattern on the fingers was alot more challenging than I thought it would be.

The glove surprized me, though. It's alot warmer than I would have expected. I'm typing with the half finished glove on, but it's quite warm. I love them.

Talk about your DPN hell, though. I've knit the body of the glove in magic loop, but the fingers are less than 20 stitches each. Yeah. DPNS. And the rest of the edge held on DPNS. Imagine trying to knit with the active stitches on 4 needles, and then there are 2 MORE DPNS at the bottom, holding the other stitches for the rest of the fingers. It's like a bundle of twigs with yarn.

Mod notes: I simply left off 2 stitches on the chart D repeat to make it a smaller lace repeat for the fingers. It works well for the middle finger though, where I had 20 sts. I kept knitting the fingers on size 3 needles because I liked the gauge and it looks like it works well. I also did 6 repeats of the rib pattern before creating the hole for the thumb gusset. i used 10 repeats for to cover my wrists. I did NOT use the secondary lace charts for the tip of the thumb. Instead, I just used the lace rib for 2 rows. On each of the fingers, I used the picot cast off, but I only used 3 sts between each bump. For the arm cuff, I spaced 4 stitches between instead of 5. Pictures soon, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.