Today's Glove Hall of Shame features the very first pair of gloves I made for DH. I'm guessing these are at least 15 years old because I bought the wool fingering weight yarn from Kmart.

The glove appeared to fit when DH models it so I could not for the life of me figure out what the problem was for a very long time.



Looking closer at the glove you can see that the fingers are freakishly short although that wasn't the cause of the problem. The real problem was that I added about 1 1/2" more than necessary between the base of the thumb and the base of the little finger.




To fix this problem when you are making gloves for someone else, simply hold up the glove in progress to the drawing you've made of their hand. That way you can start the base of the fingers at exactly the right spot.



(BTW, try to measure the person's dominant hand for gloves because it is usually larger and more muscular.)

Maia had an excellent question in the comments. She wondered if you can put the pinkie stitches on waste yarn and knit the extra rows of the hand - i.e., doing it in reverse from the way I talked about. I never thought about it but yes, there is no reason you couldn't do it this way and it would be less fiddly and faster.

I think the sequence you do the fingers is a matter of personal preference. About half the glove patterns I see have you knitting the index finger first and the half instruct you to do the little finger first. All glove patterns I've seen instruct you to knit the thumb last. I usually knit the little finger and then the thumb so I have an anchor on each side of the glove to better measure the base of the other fingers. If you're doing a peasant thumb and you have no opening for the thumb stitches, you should knit the thumb before most of the other fingers just so you can try the glove on while knitting.

Jennifer has asked if I've tried Joyce William's unique glove construction method and I'll have photos of that method tomorrow.