Knitting My First Pair of Gloves (For Ben)

I've been friends with Ben for over a decade now, and for Christmas he asked for gloves. I am aware that it’s now March, so at this point it’s more of a Christmas/birthday/thank-you-for-doing-my-taxes gift. His birthday was last month, my birthday is next month, and also he just so happens to be my accountant. So, since I’ll be seeing him next weekend to file my taxes, it’s high time to finish this project.

Ben said that if the idea was too much work to let him know, but he was gloveless in the middle of a Syracuse winter and I was excited to try knitting five-finger gloves for the first time. He requested Patriots colors, sending me the team logo as if I had never seen it, and following up with, “Like maybe most of it is that navy blue, but then it has red accents or something.” I responded, “Bet.”

First thing the next morning I drove out to the local yarn store to peruse shades of navy blue. I already had bright red leftover in Drops Extra Fine Merino from my brother’s New Jersey Devils sweater, but the shade of blue is really what determines how those colors read as a team—one shade brighter and they could easily start looking like Buffalo Bills gloves. 

After looking through a few options, I ended up choosing Urth Yarns 16 Worsted in the shade BL50. It’s hand-dyed with a very subtle, almost barely-there variation that makes the color feel especially beautiful. And it is unbelievably soft. At $32 it’s definitely a bit of a luxury skein, but since I only needed one for this project it felt easy enough to justify. And secretly, getting to work with yarn this nice is a bit of a treat for me too.

For the actual glove pattern, my main concern was making sure Ben’s gloves would actually fit the way they should. I ended up finding this pattern from Nimble Needles that walks you through how to knit five-finger gloves based on your own hand measurements and gauge rather than strict sizes. It also has a full video tutorial to go along with it, which is ideal for something this detailed and new to me.

I sent Ben the example from the pattern and asked him to trace his hand and measure it in those three spots so I could make him some gloves that actually fit. I also asked for the distance from the tip of his middle finger to his wrist. 

A couple of weeks later, he sent me this:

It took a little while because he didn’t have computer paper at home, but he didn’t have a ruler at work, and he kept forgetting to bring his hand drawing home. And apparently tracing his thumb was its own challenge. His measurements also included fractions down to the sixteenth, which I needed to convert to decimals to actually work with. You can kind of see he also measured the thumb gusset wrong, so I had to do a bit of guessing there. 

Once I had his measurements (more or less), it was time to actually start the gloves. 

The pattern suggests using a stretchy cast-on of your choice. It mentions German twisted cast-on as one option, so I decided to go with that, which I learned solely from this image:

From there, the pattern simply calls for a ribbed cuff, but since Ben asked for mostly navy with red accents, I decided to use two-color fisherman’s rib to incorporate the red there. This was another technique I ended up learning for this project.

The color knit below becomes the knit columns on the right side.

After finishing the cuff, I switched from 3.25mm short circulars to 3.75mm double-pointed needles to begin working the rest of the glove. Knitting in the round with DPNs was another new skill for me on this project, but the Karbonz needles that Nimble Needles recommends have definitely helped make that process easier to manage. They’re a bit pricey as a full set, so I just got the size I needed for this project.

Between learning the German twisted cast-on, figuring out two-color fisherman’s rib, and juggling this many double-pointed needles at once, almost every step of this project has involved learning something new. Each stage has had its own little mental hurdle before I could move on to the next part.

But despite the learning curve, I’m really happy with how they’re turning out so far.

At the moment I’m about 80% of the way through the first glove. Before finishing the middle and index fingers, I actually started the cuff for the second glove so I wouldn’t completely forget what I was doing.

Stay tuned for the finished gloves next week!