Cables

Have you seen the Fetching Fingerless Gloves from Knitty ? Do you want to make them, but don't have a cable needle or extra dpn, or you just aren't sure if you can make cables? Well, if you aren't a beginning knitter, and you don't mind a few acrobatics with dropped stitches, then cables without cable needles is what you need.

I know when you first read Wendy's tutorial on doing them that you'll say "No way!" but I tried it and as long as you're careful and hold the stitches just beneath them, then you can do this. I now do cables this way when I make cables-which isn't very often, admittedly-so I have no use for buying extra equipment just to make them with.

I would suggest that you take some scrap yarn and some needles and practice this technique before implementing it in a project so you can do it effortlessly-or as effortlessly as possible. Sometimes you will split the stitch when picking up the dropped stitches, but that's easily remedied for any knitter who isn't a rank beginner.

Anyway. I probably have a post about this somewhere in my archives, but I just think it bears repeating now and then.

And while we're on the subject of the Fetching glove, she uses a pretty bulky yarn and larger needles, which makes the glove look pretty big with her pattern. I've seen posts in a knitting community about it-which was several years ago, but that doesn't matter-and they pretty much said when they made them that way, the glove was big. Well, I tried the pattern using Cascade 220 superwash wool and #3 DPNs and followed her pattern exactly. While my glove wasn't thick and chunky like hers, it did fit like....well....a glove. Also, I don't like the picot bind off, so I just bind off in a normal bind off, following the K4, P1 pattern. And before any of you say that I probably just have a small hand-no, I don't-I may not have huge hands, but they've never been small and dainty either, so that glove pattern-made to her specs-would probably fit a man's hand, if a man were so inclined to wear fingerless mitts like that. If I was to make them with a chunkier yarn, I'd probably go down to about a #5 or #4 set of needles to make them a bit smaller.