Francois Gloves

The reason I've been making so many gloves lately is because a friend who is a boy asked for a pair of half-finger gloves for himself. This is pretty cool since normally all my commissions are for girls, or are from a girl for another girl/baby/child, or for me.

The Crazy Gloves and the Round 2 Gloves were trial runs on the pattern for these. After making the other pairs I was able to get a running set of sizes going so I could figure out how to make them fit a guy.

He asked for ones in gray and at my recent trip to Twisted Yarns, I found a very handsome Charcoal gray wool sock yarn by Cascade Yarns called Heritage.

Using the F hook last time on the brown striped ones did make a larger size, but it was laughably too small for a guys hands. With that in mind I added 6 stitches (1 inch) to the starting row cuff to make it a bit larger around in all ways. From there I also added more cuff rows, another several rows to the palm height, and one to the finger length.

Basically I was trying to scale up the pattern in all ways proportionally. It was a little slow going, but I had him trace his hand so I had something to compare my work to, that helped to make sure the pattern might fit. I only did half of one glove and had him try it on next I saw him, to make sure I didn't do too much cutting of the yarn before I knew if it would really fit or not.

Stopped here for a fitting.

The fitting was good and bad. Firstly the width was perfect and fit nicely around his hand, however the length was really short. The textured cuff sat above his wrist on his actual hand, and the thumb was too close to the wrist. Basically I needed to add several more palm rows, which meant taking it apart back down to the cuff. So yay for fittings!

Since I was back at the cuff I decided to add a few more rows to the cuff to make it thicker. Then I added several more rows to the palm. I could then redo the thumb in the same way, but adding yet another row on it for length. I stopped again to have him try it on again.

Redone for second fitting.

I finished the glove up and waited for a chance to try it again. We had dinner before a party and he tried it on again. Better, but still too short to his thumb. So once again I took the thumb off, added a few rows and put the thumb back on. After doing so much lengthening of the piece I could safely assume I would need at least 10 rows from the thumb to the knuckles. But I wanted to be sure I could move on so I waited again for a third fitting.

"Friendsgiving" rolled around and I brought the work with me. I had him keep trying it on after I completed each section of work. That was smart, we needed to add more palm rows, and my guesses on knuckle area was too large. Made the rest of the fingers up and actually completed one glove at the party so that I had a finished pattern to make the second from.

Glove number 1 done!

At home it took me working a little bit on it over two days, maybe 5 hours, to complete the second one.

Glove number 2!

With so much alteration to the pattern that I bought for these originally I feel like I am not really helping you out to make some for the men in your life, but at the same time I don't want to violate any wishes. Sorry about that.

I have to say that this yarn was really amazing. It it nice and soft and perfect for these gloves. They will look very handsome with black or gray winter wear. These do look a little weird flat like this so maybe I can get a picture of them in action sometime. :)

Difficulty: The gloves aren't a tough pattern, but altering it to fit properly was a pain. Intermediate.
Time to complete: about 15 hours for the first, 5 for the second.

Update: Picture obtained!