I took the first of three thursday night 7-9 p.m. glove classes last night. I got pretty far along on my first glove seeing that I learned a new knitting in the round method called magic loop. What's cool about magic loop is you don't get the laddering effect that happens where you change needles when you knit with double points and you don't need two sets of circular needles so you save a little money. With magic loop you simply just split the stitches in half leaving the stitches you are knitting on the front needle and the on hold stitches on the cable behind. The working yarn always comes up through the center. Our teacher Maria, also showed us an easy joining method for joining the first round. You simply cast on one additional stitch at the very end, then pass it to the other needle (toward the next stitch you would knit) and then knit two together. It works beautifully.

For this glove project I'm going all the way and knitting the fingers. I figure if I don't like 'em I can always frog it back to the fingerless point and bind off. At least this way I'll learn how to do fingers. For this project I chose Koigu Kerstie 100% merino wool in a variable olive green hue that is approx 5.5 stitches to the inch. They recommend using a number 6 needle, but Maria said for gloves it's better to have it a bit tighter so I went with No. 5 addi turbos 'cause the cable is more flexible that the plastic cords on the Clover bamboo needles. We are using Maria's custom glove pattern which is great because you can easily change the pattern to accommodate any size hand by just plugging the measurements into her formula. My hand is a 7.5 inch circumference and my big thumb knuckle is 3.5 inches. My gauge is 6.25 inches. So you multiply the the hand circumference by the stitch gauge and that’s your cast on number. I needed to round down for a number divisible by 4 (I decided to do 2x2 ribbing on the cuff) so I cast on 44 stitches. Then you're ready to begin. I’m doing a 2 inch cuff which is about as far as I got last night. You can see my progress above and a fellow class mate, Alison.