After I found myself wearing my Hermione Hearts Ron hat about 4 days out of every 7 after I knit it, I decided that I really ought to have a pair of gloves that matched. Or rather, I felt an irrational annoyance about wearing black gloves with a grey hat, so I cast on to avoid minor insanity. I had plenty of matching yarn (which I’d originally intended for a coordinating scarf) and one of knitting world’s go-to simple glove patterns, so everything should have been a breeze.

And it was, basically, except that I discovered that I hate small circumference knitting. It’s not hard, just terribly fiddly. I used Magic Loop, which I prefer to DPNs or two circulars, so I didn’t have any needle mishaps, just the constant sliding of needles in and out of stitches and the constant turning of the work. To top it off, gloves require you to weave in about 10 ends per hand when the knitting’s done, and I loathe weaving in ends. I’ll happily seam sweaters all day, but will whine and drag my heels when it comes to weaving in ends on anything.

If I’m honest, the knitting went fairly quickly once I committed to it, I just didn’t enjoy it and so found it difficult to actually work on. You may well wonder why I bothered if I didn’t enjoy it, and the simple answer is that I wanted the matching gloves badly enough to persevere. But if I should lose them next winter, or the holes re-open between the fingers, I’ll just buy replacements and feel no remorse.

Things I Did Differently

• I cast on stitches additional stitches between the fingers using the knit (or in this case, purl) cast on instead of backwards loop, since it seems less likely to become loose and distorted.

Things I Would Do Differently

• Because I started the first glove during a long car ride, I didn’t bother to record the modifications I made to the pattern, figuring I could always re-measure my hand and recount stitches or rounds. This is really out of character for me, and in hindsight I think it would have made me feel a bit better to have actually symmetrical gloves.
• On the first glove, I didn’t knit enough rounds between the wrist and the base of the pinky, so the palm’s a little tight. I overcompensated on the second glove and ended up with too many rounds between the base of the pinky and the bases of the other fingers, making the palm too loose. If I were ever to knit another pair, I’d try to find a better compromise for length.

Some General Suggestions

• I tried to to use kitchener stitch to graft one of the fingertips closed because I thought it would have a neater finish that would be less likely to unravel, but I don’t recommend it. First of all, I didn’t have an even number stitches, so grafting was doomed to not work out, but was also a lot of extra work and doesn’t seem any more sturdy than simply breaking the yarn, threading the tail through the live stitches, and weaving in the end.
• If you’re having trouble moving stitches previously on the cable onto the needle to be worked, move the stitches on the other needle (the one that’s going to be the new working needle) onto the cable first. With both sets of stitches briefly on the cable, there’s more slack in the yarn that bridges the two needles, allowing stitches to be moved onto the needle more easily.