Is it just me or does winter sewing seem to take longer than summer sewing? Maybe it’s all those thick fabrics, linings, and long sleeves. I do have a few things I’ve recently sewn that I want to write about soon, but I don’t seem to have pictures of them yet. In the meantime, my sister had one of her British Movie Parties about a week and a half ago and included manicures as part of the fun (we watched North and South; she had plenty of time to do everyone’s nails). So long as my hands were pampered half-way into being photogenic, it seemed like a good time to get pictures of the Queen Anne’s Lace gloves I finished up a few months ago. Serious knitters, avert your eyes; my blocking leaves something to be desired.
The pattern is from Seamstress Erin (I’m so glad I’m not the only person in the sewing-blog world who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to oneself as a “seamstress”)
I chose to use Shibui Knits Cima as my yarn. The colorway I had was called “nude”, and I don’t see it on their site right now. It’s a lovely soft pink color reminiscent of ballet tights. I don’t usually think of soft pink as being a difficult color to photograph, so either it was protesting my photo setup or how I had Romeo behind the camera because it seems to have tried to turn a different color in every picture we took. This yarn has less bulk than what Erin used for her pattern, so my “fabric” is a much looser weave than hers, even though I was able to get the correct gauge.
Obviously, these aren’t serious winter gloves, so the looseness of the fabric doesn’t bother me. Where I’m going to wear them, however, is something of a conundrum. I do like them, but the light color is really impractical. I won’t be planning to wear them in any situation that may involve the use of an ink pen.
I would recommend this pattern to anyone looking to knit a dainty pair of fingerless gloves. I wouldn’t recommend this as a first lace project, since some of the stitches are a little complex. I also wouldn’t recommend this as a first project for the use of double-pointed needles; there are yarn-overs that are set-up to be on the ends of the needles and it is really easy to accidentally drop these. I found the errata the hard way, by realizing my stitch count kept getting off and finally figuring out that it had nothing to do with dropping those end-of-needle yarn-overs. Errata info is up on the Ravelry site (and I think she fixed the pattern if you buy it new).
Guinevere came to the movie party with me, so she got her nails done too and wanted to show them off in pictures. My gloves are a little big for her, as you can see. She decided she liked watching Richard Armitage better as Guy of Gisborne than she did as Mr. Thornton, and that she prefers Jonas Armstrong as Robin Hood over Richard Armitage in any role.
How about you, any transitional season knitting projects going on? Do you find your finished sewing product production takes a nose-dive in the colder months, even though your time spent sewing increases? Do you want to weigh in on Guinevere’s opinion of Richard Armitage vs. Jonas Armstrong? How about an opinion of Mr. Thornton vs. Mr. Darcy?
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