Cigar Gloves

My friend P (affectionately P-Diddy) is a huge cigar fan. It's one of those things he takes great pleasure in, no matter what the weather. He and his cronies get together for drinks and dinner and they usually wind up their evenings with a cigar, living the good life. While cigars are not necessarily my thing, for awhile Photo-Man also enjoyed them. In fact there's still a stash of them somewhere, though not nearly as huge as my yarn and fiber stash.

So P's birthday came around again this year and I vowed this time I would produce what I had promised a year ago! And I wanted them to be perfect. As in all things I knit. Which of course makes me a bit crazed in the execution but it's all for the best.

Naturally, in the quest for perfection we needed several beers discussions. First, there was the time I carefully measured his hands. That might have been over a year ago? I know I recorded the statistics in my Blackberry! I ordered the yarn and then promptly moved on to other knitting projects. Guilty. As the birthday approached this year, it was a great excuse for more beers discussions and this time I produced a half finished sample.


I riffed a bit from a Knitty pattern I'd queued up ages ago. Only for some reason I thought a 3" ribbed cuff would be too much, and chose a 1.5" ribbed cuff. And I jazzed it up a bit with the gold edge color but that took a few attempts to get the right balance - not too much, not too over the top. P is a down the middle kinda guy dressing wise.

Well, he was pleased but I was not. Turns out the short cuff bothered me. And the fit was not quite right. Several evenings of working up different variations I concluded that the pattern as written made the most sense. A 3" ribbed cuff fits and knitting the entire glove on size 5 dpns just fits better and makes a warm, dense fabric when using Cascade 220. Such a versatile, workhorse of a yarn.

Now, knitting fingers is a bit fiddly, I will admit. And because of that and the fact that I essentially knit the equivalent of four gloves to make a pair, the project took a bit longer than I originally anticipated, meaning I missed the birthday again!

I took advantage of that nice day a week ago to get some shots of these gloves, while we coordinated schedules. This time, it was lunch, not beers and no cigars, but these gloves do work well for checking email on Blackberrys too! Ah, modern life. I'm sure P-Diddy would prefer more cigars and less email...