Gloves Finished

With a lot of long hours and little sleep during the month of December I managed to finish all of the projects I needed to get done for Christmas except for one glove in my husband's pair.  I figured he would understand if his weren't finished by the time we celebrated our family Christmas on the Tuesday after Christmas.  He knew how hard I had been working to try to get them all finished.  It is a good thing we had a few extra days after Christmas before we celebrated so I could get them all done.

These are the two women's gloves I had to do over because the first ones I did sold at the holiday festival.  The black ones are for Cheryl and the brown ones are Kay's.  I guess I need to shorten the fingers on Cheryl's, but she has not returned them to me so that I can do that.  It isn't hard to do because each finger is done separately and ends at the tip, so I just need to take out a couple of rows and retie them off.  It just takes time.

These are for Ellis and Portia.   All the boys gloves have just the fingertips a different color whereas the girls have the multicolored fingers.

These are for Dot, Lucy, Ezra, and Annie.  Dot did not like the way the fingers felt so I had to take hers out and redo all the fingers except for the thumb.  She wanted them to have just purple fingers so I took out the last couple rows of the green for the palm and started the break in color there so it would not feel funky where the color changed for each finger.  It worked and she likes them better, but I did not include a picture of the do-over gloves.  Annie's mittens needed to be longer for the wrist, so I just picked up stitches on the cuff and knitted the other direction to lengthen them.  I guess they fit now, because they never told me if they did after they got them back.

These are for Lexi and Joey. Lexi almost always wears pink, so her main color was pink.  Joey's gloves match his coat wonderfully.  I was going to do his in red with navy blue fingertips but he just got a coat that is black with this bright blue design of some kind swirling throughout.  These were the exact color of his coat so I used the navy blue and red for Ezra's.

These are for Zoe and Jackson.  I had to redo all of Zoe's fingers on one glove because they were a little too tight.  Somehow one glove fit and the other did not.  I always knit it the same, but the tie in for the colors seemed to be the problem.  There are always so many strings to tie in and hide when there are so many different colors being used.  I could not actually tie a knot because it left a bump if I did, so I had to weave all the loose ends into the yarn in such a way that they would not ravel or come undone.  It took almost more time to tie in the loose ends than to actually do the knitting of the glove.  It was probably a crazy idea to make them so crazy looking, but I just wanted to use all the colors so the girls would not be jealous of the color of some other girl's gloves.  All the same colors were used in each glove.  What varied was the main color and the cuff for each pair.

These are the only pictures I have for the six pairs of men's gloves that I made.  I had three pairs finished before the festival, but I sold one pair and had to make another one plus the other three I needed for Christmas.  These gloves were all made from 100% wool and all of them fit wonderfully.  Each were done in a different color.

By the time I had finished almost all of the gloves, I finally got a better way of tying in the fingers. At first, I was always getting a big hole, but I discovered a way to avoid that and the last pairs of gloves were being done without the holes.  I wish I had discovered it earlier because it would have saved time and effort to weave the holes shut.  Gloves are not really that hard to do, but I never want to make so many again at one time.

I have started working on the projects that I need to finish that were ordered at the festival.  I need to get two play sets completed.  I am almost finished with the one that needs to be done for January and will get started on the other one as soon as I finish this one.  It needs to be done for February.  I may take a break with knitting after that for awhile.  My arms and fingers have taken a beating from all of these extra hours of constant work.