On the benefits of designing gauntlets.

I may or may not have mentioned that I'm designing a pair of lace fingerless gauntlets for Kitty.  She had some pretty stringent specs for them:

1) Long -- Fingerless GAUNTLETS, not Fingerless Mitts.  To the elbow. She'd likely have been happy had I made them go past her elbow, but I didn't to deal with the potential challenges of the elbow.

2) Lace -- but not too lacy.  She's not known for being gentle on things.

3) No wool -- because even though she wanted them long long long -- her hands get really hot.

And I've done it. She says it's perfect. (Phew -- knitting for teenagers is risky.)

While I now have a great plan for gauntlets (or wrist warmers for that matter) that catch the thumb without covering the palm, I also have a completed gauntlet pattern for more standard gauntlets.  I've also got a completed gauntlet to which I made some adjustments to reduce the palm coverage. 

And now... I get to do the first teal test of my pattern myself!  That's the benefit of designing things that come in pairs.  To finish making sure that the design works for both hands, (and to finish the pair for Kitty), I have to/get to test the pattern in a way I don't really get to test other things.

There's a reason I don't test knit very often.  I tend to "fix" mistakes as I knit.  And when I'm knitting my own patterns, I tend to do what I know what's supposed to happen, whether or not I actually wrote it down that way. (That makes me a truly horrid test knitter for my own patterns).  But, when I'm trying to figure out what ways the left one is going to work out differently from the right -- well... I have less tendency to just do what I know is there, and am more likely to really see what I wrote.

Soon, I hope, I'll be sending this pattern off to real testers.

 

Comments

[Colleen G]

Oooh, we want pics!