Rookie Mistakes

I decided to make a pair of gloves for a dear friend. So far so good. I got alpaca yarn, nice and warm, for the hands, and cashmere, supersoft, for the wrists. Again, so far so good. I wanted to get them done quickly- it's cold out there! So rather than re-invent the wheel, I turned to the tried and true "recipe book" by Ann Budd and just decided to make plain and simple standard gloves for now- I'll make fancy ones at some later point.

Ok, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to trace his hand to be sure the gloves would fit perfectly. Done. Then I measured the tracing and did a gauge swatch. Got it all set up, started off, knitted the glove- then thought, wait, that looks fairly small. I compared it with the tracing, and it looked fine, but when I put it on, it was just a smidge bigger than my hand- and the hand of the recipient is considerably bigger. Then light broke- duh; I failed to take into account the thickness of the hand- sigh. You'd think I was new to all this.

So off I go again, next size up, get the glove done and have this nagging feeling something's STILL wrong- it seems as big as a baseball glove to me. I dragoon my poor brother into trying it on in lieu of the intended owner, and while it's loose on his large hand, he tells me it's not so bad. But I'm not satisfied. Before I start glove 2, I look at #1, measure it, and realize.... somewhere along the road my gauge has gone from 7 sts per inch to 6. That's right, the oldest, most basic mistake in the book- check, check, and recheck your gauge. ARRGH. So now, we're off on version 3 of glove #1. Sigh. Thank god, in knitting, you can just rip out and start over when you make a mistake, without even ruining the materials. That may be the thing I like best about it- it's never a complete loss.