Sometimes it`s better to knit than design

Your week has probably been entirely 100% free of curiosity about how the thumb turned out on my fingerless glove experiment but: too bad! Here it is anyway.

I don't think it looks completely terrible here.  Maybe a bit heavy on the dark colours, given how many brights are running around mid-palm.  Trust me though, there are problems.

Digression to the Lesser Problems

Picking up the stitches was fun just about every time I did it, ahem. The third time, I came up with a sneaky way to pick up a stitch without making a hole, even though though the fabric really wanted to make a hole there (subject for separate post some time when I'm able to take pictures of that) and I figured out how to hide any remaining oddities in it (by making that stitch a purl - then it sort of receded and took any telltale signs with it.)

My idea for shaping the thumb didn't work, so that part of the project was a bust.  As you know, the thumb shaping was kind of the whole point, so: sad.  Still, I salvaged it with an entirely different approach. That should be a plus, right?

Probably when I was knitting I left the thumb opening way too wide for any human thumb, but a clever and quick approach to decreasing can fix that sort of problem.  After all, what's less comfortable than a thumb that's too tight?

And now to the Big Problem

That last icky was the root of it.  The speed and efficiency of the decreases.  See, the thumb shaping technique I ended up with - short rows - was a distraction from the all-important stitch reduction rendered essential by the too-big thumb opening.  I put off the decreases, which means the thumb was too big for a lot of the time, and then very suddenly became very small.

This photograph will give you some idea of how that worked out, if you're not already picturing it in your mind:

 And this description should give you a much more accurate one:

Teapot Spout.

I know it doesn't look that bad in that shot, and that's because I'm on-purpose showing you the least awful one.  Trust me, this thing looks like the nose on Angela Lansbury's teapot in Disney's Beauty And The Beast.

Took me all weekend to surgically attach a teapot spout to a glove for my thumb to go through, is what I'm saying here.  What I'm not saying is that I'm going to spend all of the coming one surgically attaching a different sort of thumb (but I might, because at a certain point when you've invested that much time and yarn it's crazy not to see things through.)


In other, non-knitting news:  72,000 words, folks.  The book is just ticking along right now.  And if you're finding Hugs a bit boring at the moment you should care about the word count because the sooner I'm done a first draft, the sooner I can get back to interesting knits.  Yaaaay


And now, let me wish you a wonderful and productive June weekend, and a happy reunion for us all on Monday!