Res Completae: Knucks with Fingers

A manly Christmas gift...



Knucks with fingers!

Pattern: Knucks, by Pamela Grossman for Knitty
Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed, 1 complete ball of Dragon
Needles: US 4 dpns
Start to finish: November 5-9, 2007
Mods: Well, I added fingers. I guess you could say my only mod was starting at the fingertips instead of the finger joints. Everything else is exactly the same.

Notes: For the top-down fingers, I first tried the double knitted technique described in the Hand in Glove Pattern by Wool and Company. My fingertips ended up HUGE and very square, so I gave up. It was fun to do, but I think I was knitting much too loosely to get a really snug fingertip. I then tried Nona Knits' I-cord Glove as a basis for my fingers. This is very, very cool. You basically knit the finger like an i-cord (working so few stitches flat instead of in the round, for me, made it easier to increase for a tapered tip), then twist up the "ladder" stitches when the finger is done. This worked quite well, but as you can see below, I didn't do a great job twisting those ladder stitches on some of the fingers.



Because there was no way I was going to redo that glove, for the next one, I used an adaptation of this technique, as pointed out by Cara of January One. I worked the i-cord for five or six rows, then picked up the ladder stitches, and worked the rest of the way down in the round. I also realized that putting the ladder row (even though it was really only ladderific at the very top) on the side of the finger, instead of the middle looked much nicer. Better, eh?



I had a lot of fun figuring out the best way to make the fingers, but I was so close to running out of yarn there at the end that I thought I might have a heart attack. I pretty much worked the entire second glove thinking I didn't have enough (yet kept going because I was NOT GOING TO LET THE YARN WIN). What's worse is I bought the yarn on vacation in North Carolina so there was no way I'd be able to find another ball in the same dye lot easily. Phew! The cuffs are a little skimpy, but in the end, I won.