My Virtual Sanity

Have you ever felt the need to share your thoughts with virtual strangers just so you can pretend that you have adult conversations during the day? Well, that's what I'm about to do. Be prepaired for my life as a stay at home, obsessive knitter, and my attempts to stay connected with the rest of the world.

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Location: Denver, Colorado, United States

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Finished! Grandma's Gloves

Pattern: "Cozy Cabled Gloves" from Knitting in the Round
Yarn: Sport weight red, green, and gold twisted washable wool Ebay yarn (Same yarn used for Conwy socks). Knit with 2 strands together to make worsted weight
Needles: Sizes 8 and 6 dpn
Date started: 3-4-06
Date finished: 3-7-06

My grandma is an amazing woman. She is a pediatric nurse and has work night shift in people's homes for more years than I've been alive taking poor sick kids on ventilators. They are completely helpless, poor things. She is also my "horse" grandma. She owns a horse boarding facility which was a dream of hers, and really spoils the horses far too much. She also has electrical problems in her barn, so not all of the stalls have water heaters in the winter. This means that when she feeds the horses in the morning, there is a layer of ice covering the water on very cold days. She complained to me that she inevitably as she's chopping and then scooping this ice out it gets her gloves wet and her hands get very cold. I thought "Aha! I know what would be good for that! Wool!" Wool has amazing properties. It can be almost sopping wet and still retain it's warmth. Elizabeth Zimmerman in her book "Knitting Without Tears" talks about her husband hunting all day in soggy socks after rescuing a dog from a half frozen pond with no ill effects. I immediately offered to make my grandma some wool gloves.

I really like this pattern. It is very simple and goes amazingly fast. I finished the first glove in half a day! It uses size 8 dpn and worsted weight yarn, with a whopping 34 stitch cast on! After just knitting socks on size 1 needles and 64 stitches, these felt like nothing to whip out. I also really like how this yarn works up when doubled. The colors are more rich with larger stitches, and the cables show up fantastically! This is the third pair of gloves I've made using this pattern. The 2 previous pairs were Christmas presents, and were what sparked the massive knitting campaign. They were my VERY first project involving dpn, and you now know how I adore dpn. If you can knit a round tube, and pick up stitches along the side of things, you too can make gloves, they are deceptively simple.

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