The beady eyed among you will have realised that even my intentions to write a monthly newsletter have fallen along the wayside … but the road to hell is paved with good intentions ….. so every time I post I have to re-invent why I’m writing, especially if progress is slow on the glove front.
This blog started life as a record of my glove knitting activities, including knitting, researching and designing them. So it still stands as a record of that. As well as knitting gloves I have plenty of other textile interests – knitting things that aren’t gloves and volunteering in the collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild mainly but these are not the main subject of the blog.
I also do quite a lot of hiking, travelling, playing music and seeing friends and family. I can’t imagine anyone being interested in any of this, or at least not very much of it, perhaps some of the travel, so I generally keep those things separate. Sometimes I put them on Facebook especially if Oscar the borrowed dog is involved. He always gets lots of likes.
However, and you can probably tell that I’m arguing with myself here, I think that the main purpose of the blog is glove knitting. It’s mainly for myself I think, although if other people – you – ? – read it than that’s great and I hope that you find it useful and interesting. I know people find it when they are thinking about knitting a pair of patterned gloves and I have had commissions because of it.
I also post on other social media – Instagram and Facebook – but that is also intermittent. I do also try to put my projects on Ravelry, which I like a lot as it is so structured and leaves a detailed record of projects. These are my projects on Ravelry:
https://www.ravelry.com/projects/angharadt?set=&columns=&view=thumbnail&page=&sort=created_&search=
So, here’s the glove knitting news for the last couple of months:
The group of four pairs that I called the Nature series are now more or less complete, rather later than I had planned. They were supposed to be knitted at the rate of a pair a month starting in April which means they should have been complete by the end of July. But that was only an imaginary deadline, not a real one, and without one of those, I find it hard to maintain momentum. Here they are waiting to have their working threads taken out and the ends darned in:
They were lying on the only patch of grass I could find outside our caravan in West Wales where they weren’t being blown around but you wouldn’t know that from the picture.
All the ends are now darned in. Here’s a look at the inside before doing that:
They will need a hot press so that picture will have to come later.
So what do I think of them? Well, I’m a bit pleased, but perhaps not as much as I had hoped … I have a track record of being very self critical of my design work the instant it’s finished … so nothing new here.
What would I change about them? Perhaps another couple of pairs bringing colours together – the ecru and dark grey, perhaps blue and ecru …
What’s worked well ? I think the light brown and ecru pair is the nicest pair I’ve ever designed and knitted. I love the texture in combination with the colour and will use that again, where appropriate.
When they’ve been finally pressed and tidied up I’ll post another picture.
I’m also busy with some machine knitting, some shells and some hand sewing but the project’s a secret so you’ll have to wait until early 2019 to find out about that. Here’s a couple of pictures if you didn’t see them on Instagram.
Work on my chunky knitting machine
And on my trusty Hague linker
Just one more thing for glove and mitten knitting nerds. I found a pattern for mitten thumb shaping that I’d never seen before on the Purl Soho site a day or so ago. They call them ‘Arched Gusset Mittens’ and this is the link here: I think they are rather wonderful and plan to use this shaping as soon as possible. Here’s a little picture of them from Purl Soho:
So that’s all for the moment. Thank you for reading if you’ve got this far.
Knitting gloves 