Advice sought

[aedifica]

I'm trying to make myself a pair of convertible gloves (those things that look like mittens but you fold back the top and voila, it's fingerless gloves underneath). I couldn't find a pattern that did exactly what I wanted, so I'm making up my own as I go, with ideas from several of the patterns I looked at.

I'm using my yarn double-stranded for the body of the mitten, but since that's really thick and might be uncomfortable to have two layers of double-stranded knit between my fingers, I'm thinking about knitting the fingers single-stranded (I'm not worried about loss of warmth because most of the time the fingers will be covered by the mitten flap). I'm not sure how to best do that, though: if I switch to knitting single-stranded, I'll also switch to smaller needles to keep the fabric tightly knit, and that means I'll need more stitches to go the same distance around the glove. Do you have any advice?

Ideas I've had so far:

- the first row with the single strand and smaller needles, knit two stitches into each old stitch (adjusting as needed to meet the right number of total stitches).
Or,
- knit the single-strand section separately and sew it onto the double-strand section.
Or,
- ??

Update 2/23: I pulled out the smallest DPNs I had near and did a gauge swatch of single-strand, and found out that five stitches on the double-strand with the larger needles was equivalent to six stitches of single-strand with the smaller needles. (I was surprised it wasn't more of a difference.) So I switched to the smaller needles and single strand and *knit four stitches plain, then one stitch in the front loop from the double-stranded row, then one stitch in the back loop from the double-stranded row,* (repeat starred section around the work). It worked nicely and now I'm knitting the third finger!

Comments

[hivesofactivity]

What about knitting the whole thing single-stranded, then knitting another one without the fingers, putting the first inside the second, and sewing the cuffs together? (My favourite pair of gloves, ever, were knitted by a friend who did the inner layer with really soft single-stranded wool on tiny needles, and the outer with tougher wool on bigger needles.)

[aedifica]

I'm committed to doing this pair double-stranded for the main body because I'm already up to the fingers on one! :-) But thanks for the idea--maybe I'll do that on a different pair sometime.

[sedge]

I would switch to the smaller strand and smaller needles. One thing I've played with when knitting double stranded: you can knit one stitch into one loop from the double-stranded row, and then the next stitch into the other loop.

You might or might not need to do some decreases on the next round.

[aedifica]

Hey, *that's* a neat idea. Cool, thanks! I may well end up doing that.

[aedifica]

Thanks again for the front/back idea! I just added this update in the post:

I pulled out the smallest DPNs I had near and did a gauge swatch of single-strand, and found out that five stitches on the double-strand with the larger needles was equivalent to six stitches of single-strand with the smaller needles. (I was surprised it wasn't more of a difference.) So I switched to the smaller needles and single strand and *knit four stitches plain, then one stitch in the front loop from the double-stranded row, then one stitch in the back loop from the double-stranded row,* (repeat starred section around the work). It worked nicely and now I'm knitting the third finger!

[starfish]

You could also just not bother with finger-separation at all, and make them open in the middle ... just decrease a bit or do a tight ribbing (or both).

[aedifica]

Yeah, I saw several patterns for that, but I like separate fingers!