If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know what July means: the Tour de France and its celebratory knit-along! I already know I’m going to fail at completing this year’s epic project (on which more later), so I thought I’d at least kick things off with a little bonbon… after all, it’s been a while since there was a new free pattern up here, ne c’est pas?

How about a simple pair of fingerless gloves inspired by cycling wear, with just a few classy details? I’m calling these the Vilaine Gloves in honor of the river the peloton will cross on their way into the finish town of Redon tomorrow. I knit them using far less than one skein of The Fibre Company’s Savannah DK, a summery blend of wool, cotton, linen and soy, but the pattern is written with length and percentage measurements so that you can use a yarn of any weight from your stash.

If you’d like to have at it, the pattern is here: VilaineGloves

More pictures? Glad to oblige.

I used one of my favorite thumb gussets, placing the increases only on the palm side. This treatment is most useful if there’s patterning on the back of the hand you don’t want to disturb, but I like the way it looks in general.

Final point of polish: a professorial leather button to close the wrist band. One needn’t, of course, wear these gloves for actual cycling, so you can choose as dressy a button as you wish.

As always, please contact me right away if you find errors or tricky bits in this pattern. Full disclosure: I knit and wrote this sucker in the space of two days. During the first, the yahoos up the hill who can’t wait until 4 July to light their illegal fireworks panicked my poor dog, who jumped or squeezed under the fence and went on the lam for a night and a day, causing anxiety and heartbreak in all quarters. (Thanks to all that is good in the universe, she was not run over on Sandy Boulevard and kind souls Jean and Tim coaxed her into their home and reported her so I could retrieve her the next afternoon. She is terribly footsore but safely home.) Then last night the baby decided to conduct a one-girl circus in our bed for several hours. All this is by way of saying there are probably errors, so knit with sense and trust your judgment, mes amis.

Norwegian Wedding Mittens, adapted by Jen and moi the better to suit our Betsy and her Jonathan (Jen’s handsome pair for Jonathan are here)

Mods: Braided cast on (thanks, Nancy Bush, and thanks, clever Estonian knitters), thumbs moved to the sides, palm motifs altered to add an anchor (Jonathan builds boats), a dog and a cat (Jen charted nice ones, but I forgot to copy her charts and made up my own, so our dogs and cats are similar but not identical), shortened the back motif to accommodate my extra-large row gauge. Duplicate stitched red for the central hearts. Added a ribbed cuff liner for extra coziness and a better fit.

Wool: The natural white is an alpaca/wool blend from Imperial Stock Ranch; all else is Hifa 3 from my stash.

And now I’m going to take advantage of Baby Nap Time!!! and go prepare for a conference presentation. Would I rather be knitting more colorwork? What a silly question.

This looks like the height of luxury, doesn’t it? But I think we’d earned it by singing for three hours in English, Latin, and Italian. I’ve managed a lot of knitting on my Pas de Valse cardigan during the 10am services (and other occasions impractical for lugging about a basket of yarn and accoutrements for stranded or intarsia colorwork).

I’m interested to see how this piece will look after blocking. It’s knit with a fingering-weight 2-ply Bluefaced Leicester wool on US #6 needles, which gives a rather pebbly stockinet fabric. I’m giving it entirely too much of my knitting time, but I’m so looking forward to having this airy, floaty cardigan ready for the very first spring weather.

Mr. G got a pair of fingerless gloves (actually a tweed set from this same pattern that I never Ravelled) for his birthday last year. He loved them. He wore them regularly. Alas, their little threesome eventually parted ways, as so often happens with gloves and their wearers. One glove struck off to make its fortune elsewhere and was never seen again. I told my husband I’d knit him a new pair, and he some ideas for improvements: a longer, snugger cuff. Short fingers. (I grimaced inwardly about the fingers, since they demand time and fiddliness out of all proportion to their total stitch count, but this is True Love, people. True Love doesn’t balk at fingers on gloves.)

I bought the yarn last March in Seattle at Acorn Street Yarn Shop, Rauma Finullgarn in a rich heathery brown with hints of red. (It matches Mr. G’s new beard.) I figured I’d make up the pattern as I went. Seed stitch rib for a handsome, not too clingy cuff, a variation on Ripple Stitch for the back of the hand.

I consulted with Katrin about the finger placement, as she is the reigning expert. Here’s the formula she suggested for setting up the fingers:

1. Divide the total number of stitches for the hand by 4.

2. Subtract 2 from the little finger and add them to the number for the pointer finger.

3. Put the stitches for the little finger on waste yarn, cast on 3 stitches to bridge between the little finger and the ring finger, and work two more rounds on the remaining stitches.

Then you work one finger at a time, putting the live stitches for the others on waste yarn and casting on 3 between fingers. Katrin’s reasoning for adding the stitches subtracted from the little finger to the pointer finger is that the pointer is your largest finger. She’s perfectly right. However, the middle two fingers are actually getting a total of 6 stitches added to their count because of the cast-on between fingers; the pointer and little fingers only get 3 added. So the pointer winds up at +5 while the middle and ring are both +6. So next time I might actually subtract a stitch each from the middle and ring fingers’ allotment to add to the pointer, too. It wouldn’t be missed on the palm side.

Obviously, we need photos of the gloves ON Birthday Man. He was napping when I took these, trying not to come down with the creeping crud. (Knock on wood, it seems to have worked.) Must remember to bring the gloves and the camera on Sunday when we make our usual stop for coffee after choir.