In designing my opera gloves, I am using a couple resources. The first is the stitch dictionary by Barbara Walker, A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

Additionally, I did a web search for a few different opera glove designs, but found nothing exactly to my liking. What I want is a glove pattern that goes up the forearm and over the elbow, ending in a ruffle. The fingers will be partial, so it will be a ‘fingerless’ glove, but I do want actual fingers rather than a flat line across the knuckles.

I found it a lot harder to do the swatch with the two lace patterns I’d picked out. I wanted to use one panel that’s a lace rib stitch, two lines, and one as a center panel that’s sixteen rows. It turned out to be too easy to drop stitches on the larger lace pattern, when trying to track both it and the circular knitting. I fiddled and struggled for a while and then realized, if I was having this much trouble on the swatch, I’d hate doing the gloves. I switched to the simpler two row repeat and voila!

One thing I did change, in the pattern, is that it’s a K1 * yo… etc. Well, at first, I did the K1 at the beginning of the round, but not each new needle (I’m knitting on three needles). That was pulling too wide at the joins between the needles, so I decided heck with it, I’d add a K1 on each needle change and it made the pattern much neater. Also, since the pattern is written for flat knitting, I had to reverse row 2 (which is the wrong side row), but luckily it’s just either K or P stitches, no complicated stitchcraft. It’s run to work.

I don’t have pictures yet, but when I finish the swatch I’ll post another update.