New design: knitted wrist warmers
It’s got very cold of late and I didn’t have a suitable pair of wrist warmers to wear while working in my home office. A bit of design work later and now I do!
Cold isn’t it? It even snowed here in London a week or so ago. Although it didn’t stick around for long. Rain washed it all away. There wasn’t even time for a snowball fight. This means that my home office (the spare room) is also very cold.
This is mostly my own fault as I flat refuse to put the heating on during the day. I’ve got countless crocheted blankets, knitted hats and warm sweaters. I’ve also got two Oodies. Who needs heating?
What I haven’t got, though, (because I’ve somehow lost them) is a pair of wrist warmers that I can wear while typing. I have several pairs of wrist warmers but they’re all too thick and cumbersome for typing. They keep hitting the keyboard and inserting weird characters. This is a problem when you spend your working day writing and editing.
The answer was clear: I needed to make a new pair of wrist warmers. They had to be warm, quick to make and thin enough to not interfere with my keyboard. I also wanted them to be interesting to make. I decided to knit them rather than crochet as crochet seems to make a thicker, more rigid fabric which wouldn’t fit with the ‘not interfere with my keyboard’ requirement.
I already had the perfect yarn: a sport weight lambs’ wool in turquoise that I’d started a pair of socks in years ago and never finished. In fact I never completed more than a few measly centimetres. So I unravelled what I had done and started making a gauge square.
The design
I knew I wanted some combination of lacework and cables for the front – back-of-the-hand side – but I wasn’t sure what. At first I thought I’d have a central lace panel with cables on either side, but I soon realised there wasn’t enough surface area in a wrist warmer to fit all of that. So instead I went for one cable on the outside edge – little finger side – with the lace panel on the inside – where the thumb goes.
The palm side was easy. That would be a simple stocking stitch. The wrist warmers would start and end with a short 1x1 rib section so they’d hug your wrists and fingers, keeping you nice and warm while not interfering with whatever you need to do with your hands.
The lace panel I wanted as a simple ‘climbing vine’ design – alternating yarn overs and right- and left-leaning decreases so that it (very loosely) resembles a vine with berries or leaves climbing up a wall.
I measured up, worked out how many stitches and rows I would need and then charted it all out using Google Sheets. This chart formed the basis of my new pattern.
I cast on and knitted the wrist warmers over Christmas. Having almost two weeks off work gave me plenty of time for knitting, and wrist warmers don’t take a lot of knitting. So I now have a new pair of wrist warmers to keep me warm and they’ve already come in very useful.
A pattern will follow shortly!