Rule of thumb

The very first wearable item I ever made were crocheted fingerless mittens. Since then I crochet at least one pair of them almost every year.
Over the years I have developed my own method of making them and have collected a lot of notes from each new pair I make, tweaking and improving my pattern a bit each time.
Granted, that pattern in itself isn’t all that special. Essentially it is a tube, where I skip a few stitches at a certain point to have a hole for the thumb. Pretty simple. Improvements I’ve made are mainly in the length and the fact that I’ve included a little shaping of the hand.

Lang pendel heeft zo zijn voordelen. Nieuwe handschoentjes zijn af!

I really love these gloves and so do several of my close ones.
They’re perfect to wear with the onset of chills, both indoors and outdoors. For example, I wear mine a lot while working or when it starts to get a bit chilly in the morning on the bike, but not yet chilly enough to get my thick gloves out.

That chill is now definitely back, but when I dus out my mittens, I discovered that there was a huge hole under the thumb.
Yes, I did indeed remember that I had planned to crochet myself a new pair, but of course with the heat waves and all I’d completely forgotten!

Well then, this makes the perfect opportunity to tackle that thumb problem, because that’s not the first time I’ve worn out my mittens like this!

Just because I always crocheted my mittens as a simple tube, with only a little shaping for the hand, I never include any extra space for a moving thumb. A normal glove usually has a triangular thumb inset or gusset to accommodate this. This is not so hard to include in my pattern, all I needed was to know where to start inserting it.

For this I used stitch markers, to mark the beginnen and end of the gusset. Then I increased around these markers until my triangle was the right size.