About four and a half years ago, I started working on a pair of fingerless gloves. Last month, I finally finished them.

No one’s ever accused me of being good at follow-through.

I began this project during a sweltering road trip through the Southwest. What inspired me to get elbow deep in wool in 100F+ temps is beyond me. I had a vision! And I was right. I love them! They’re made with my favorite yarn, Berroco Jasper, a delicious single-ply merino that used to come in some amazing colors. It’s self-striping yarn, and I picked a deep teal/ocean blue and a raspberry to work with. I decided to use the pattern “Knucks“, from Knitty. I wanted the fingers and cuff to be a little longer than the pattern called for. I like the result, though I wish I’d made the pinkies slightly shorter.

Overall I found the pattern solid and easy to work with, but it required quite a bit of tweaking to work with the gauge that resulted from the yarn/needle combination that I’d chosen. I made the child-sized gloves (and admittedly my hands are tiny) and they were still baggy. I tweaked the thumb gusset to be more severe and voila! A perfectly fitting glove.

So why did it take me nearly 5 years to finish them? Well, the thought of frogging the first sad, saggy glove was just too daunting for some reason. So it sat, and sat, and sat, and moved with me from one apartment to the next, to the next, and still another. Then finally last September some friends offered to host a craft party and I decided, this was it. Today was the day. I would finish these damn gloves for once and for all.

Keeping with the theme of these gloves, it happened to be an unbearably hot Sunday afternoon, but the mimosa kept me cool enough to finish knitting the glove. After all that, it only ended up taking me about 2 hours to finish! But I still had the ends to weave in. It took me another 3 months to finally get around to completing that dreaded task. But now it’s done, done, done and I can brag about it on the internet!