Blam! Wonder Woman Gloves

Sometime last…oh, I don’t know, maybe April, I was reading my Twitter feed and the lovely Karen Mahoney (a fellow Deadline Dame) was tweeting about a very cool pair of Wonder Woman fingerless gloves someone had knit. She teased that maybe I’d knit her a pair.  Since I love knitting fingerless gloves, and have a certain fondness for Karen, I said I’d love to.

I checked out the Wonder Woman gloves other knitters had posted and liked them a lot, but decided to design my own pattern.

Seriously, people.  I always think designing a knitting pattern will take no time at all and work perfectly the first time through. It is like I have this blind spot in my logic goggles when it comes to knitting (and often writing, but let’s not talk about that shall we?)  I never remember that designing a pattern takes trials, errors, time, time, time, and math.  Math!  O_o! I’m a writer for a reason, you know.

Okay, so I drew several versions of a  pattern, started thinking stitch count and yarn weight and needle size and graphing and weight and fit. Have I done this before? Yes, indeed.  But every project has its foibles.  I settled on the idea of darker, more modern-looking colors, trying to kind of “urbanize” Wonder Woman’s look.  And while I was trying to mimic her iconic outfit, I decided right off to get rid of the white stars.

But I still wanted to have the “star” feeling, so I browsed knit stitches for something that resembled a five-point star.  Not a lot I liked, which meant I had to resort to lace work.

Lace is my nemesis. It does not like me on a good day and is my torture every other.  I knit the entire glove, lace and all, which took me much, much longer than it should have.  Seriously, I think we could have landed a manned mission on Mars in the time it took me to knit that glove.

And I hated it. The lace was icky, the cool color-work parts wonky.  Back to the drawing board.

I abandoned that glove, chose a new lace pattern, and started knitting again.  Got it right this time after several failed launches (I probably knit and ripped out the cuff section on each glove over a dozen times.  Lace + me = @#!*) But finally, finally, this glove was starting to resemble the idea I had in my head.

Once I finished both gloves, I was hesitant to send them to Karen. I saw the flaws.  All of them.  I saw what I wanted to make and what I had actually made, and they didn’t exactly line up.  (Plus, the damn threads unknotted–from a break in the skein–in the middle of the frickin-frakin lace pattern! I had to do repairs in lace before it had ever been worn!)

But they were finally done, and I promised them to her, so I sent them off.  She just got them yesterday.  And she LOVES them!  I am so happy and relieved! She likes them! She really does!   And now, let me show you pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I made the cuff a little longer for actual warmth, and to balance the red-to-blue ratio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gold at the wrist and the top is a metallic thread, and a little scratchier than I’d hoped. But the gold gave it such “pop” I kept it instead of going with my original idea of a butter-cream yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They look like they’re two different sizes, but I promise you they’re not! (much) 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s the lace that hates me. It doesn’t look evil does it?

This project is done!