Top Down Gloves





I probably shouldn't have used dark brown yarn for the photos of the Joyce Williams' glove technique from her book Latvian Dreams. Oh well. Above is a photo taken after the fingers are joined.

To begin you knit the fingers top-down on two circs. Leave the bottom stitches live on waste yarn and mark each finger so you don't get them mixed up.



Next you transfer the front half of the stitches of each finger to one circ and the back half of the stitches of each finger to the other circ. (This differs from the usual method of knitting top-down gloves where you would leave the stitches in between each finger on waste yarn and use kitchener stitch to join the fingers together later.) Make sure the fingers are in the right order as it is pretty easy to get them mixed up.





Now here comes the interesting part. You knit across all three fingers but when you get to the area where two fingers meet on the inner edge of each finger, you put one stitch on a coilless safety pin to be knit on the other side and continue knitting across. On the second half of the stitches (the other circ) you pick up and knit those stitches on the coilless safety pin and put more stitches on the coilless safety pins to be picked up on the other side. Essentially what you are doing is transferring stitches from the front of the glove to the back and vice versa where the fingers meet.

Initially I thought this would mean that the circumference around the base of the fingers would end up really tight but the fingers felt fine to me. It really is a clever way of omitting potential holes (from large or loose stitches) between the fingers for top-down glove knitters. Thanks to Jennifer from the comments for her enthusiastic recommendation of this method.
The two glove patterns are done and now I'm just re-knitting them to try to avoid any errors and to add some sizes. I'll have a photo of the second glove tomorrow or Tuesday. The technique section of the booklet is finished except for a final edit and my big project for this week is to try to get as many photos and scans as possible.