Happy, happy:)

There has been a little bit of christmas knitting going on over the last few days  - yummy stripey armwarmer gloves:) I love these so much its going to be hard to part with them! But I can console myself with the fact I still have another ball of Wendy's lovely 'happy' bamboo yarn - colourway capricorn - stashed away that I can knit up for me another time!

This yarn is a soft 4ply/fingering weight bamboo mix - 75% bamboo/25% nylon - with a lovely sheen to it and it is knitting up very nicely indeed. The bamboo doesn't have as much elasticity as wool and although it's looking fine on 2.5mm needles, I think it would have been slightly better on 2.25mm's with my tension.

As an experiment, I tried a row using the continental knitting style against my usual method of 'throwing' and the tension was much tighter but knitted up a lot quicker. Hmmmm. Knitting whole lengths of stocking stitch in the round for these gloves would certainly go a lot faster this way although I still haven't spent enough time mastering all the stitches K2tog, SSK's etc. yet. But the second glove isn't the time to experiment unless I want varying tensions and sizes of glove:)))

So far, I'm onto the fingers of glove one but I'm shortening the colour runs of the self stripe sock yarn a bit as I want jazzy odd fingers - of course! I'm using an adaptation of Brigids Hearth's armwarmers pattern which you can find here. It's only designed to be long mitts from elbow to just over the thumb, but I like gloves and if you're going to warm your arm, it's a shame to leave the fingers out!! It's a quick knit though and perfect for self-striping yarns.

Actually, this would be a brilliant pattern to use up those leftover small balls of sock yarn and much more personalised too. Shame most of my stash is DK or bigger;) I'll have to hunt out another pattern or modify this one. Do you think Christmas is going to end up being on a theme of gloves?? Wasn't intended to be but it's an idea ....... ;)))