Needles & Hooks

I’m thrilled that so many of you love my giant glove!

In response to some of your questions in the comments:

Where can you get your own hand chair?
You can get your own here in a variety of colors. There are other places too, just Google “hand chair”, but that one seemed the most affordable. Sorry, you’ll have to knit your own glove though. And no, I don’t have a pattern, I literally made it up as I went along.

How long did it take to knit?
In all, it probably took me a month to knit, in fits and spurts. Remember - big needles! I’d work on it a few hours a day while I was page proofing over the last month. My eyes were reading, my hands were knitting. Throughout this process, my desk was littered with marking pens, empty Pepsi bottles, drafts of the document I was working on, stitch markers, and random pieces of my Options set.

Will there be a spreadsheet?
Ha haha ahahha ahahahh ahahha hahah hah ahhah ahah…ha.

Will you go into mass production?
See above.

Second glove syndrome?
For me this is a one of a kind. And really, there’s only left hands. Although, my co-worker brought a second one from home for the photo shoot, which was at a local farm ice cream stand. And when he set it down, before I dressed it, I did gasp “Oh no! That’s the other hand!”.

Is that the largest glove ever knitted?
Until someone proves me wrong, I’m going to say it is. As for the record books, someone should start one. Wonder if we can get sponsorship? The Rowan Book of World Knitting Records?

Who has “a few” hand chairs?
My co-worker. Quite a wacky guy. I could tell you stories. Never seen a food item he wouldn’t eat (we got him Bacon Cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory once and he loved it). Has an office filled with wacky toys (I got him a chicken chucker, he’s got a box of wind-up walking sushi). Freely provides food to anyone and everyone (there’s always something chocolate in his office). Part of the team of “food scientists” that I hang out with at work (we don’t work with food, we just try every new candy and cookie offering out there - in the name of science!; we make liquid nitrogen ice cream regularly). I got him a gummi t-bone steak that has a place of honor on his wall. I adore him.

Why did Hillary climb Everest?
Because it was there.

Some Notes
Sadly, cameras are not allowed at my workplace, so there aren’t any “in-progress” shots. It was quite a production. Almost everyone who passes my office notices the hand, many of them noticed the glove-in-progress as well. In the ~10-month gap between fingers 1&2 and the rest, everyone was quiet about it. Then I started finger #3. And by finger #4, a couple of people asked if I was working on it again. One of my supervisors even came by one morning as I was putting it back on the hand and expressed relief that it wasn’t gone for good — he’d passed my office the night before and noticed it missing because I’d taken it off to do some knitting at home.

This effort highlighted the beliefs about yarn in the world. One person who stopped by said “Wow, that’s a lot of wool”. Yeah, because wool would be affordable! Someone else said “well, it would be cheaper if you used cotton, right?” Um, no. No, this would not have been possible without the wonders of modern plastic. With Caron acrylic, the total cost was around $30. However, wool would have been a lot more pleasant to knit. The yarn was absolute murder on my hands.

Finally, I have to give a real shout-out to my Knit Picks Options needles. Doing this without an interchangeable set would have been a royal pain. I used (and broke) both of my 60″ cables (and successfully super-glued them back together). I swapped out my working size 11 tips with smaller ones to move stitches onto a holding needle so that I could fit it back over to try it on for sizing. I used (and broke) a smaller cable when I was knitting across a smaller number of stitches at the narrowest point of ribbing. The only thing that would have made the Options better was if I had a cable coupler - because I really did need more than one 60″ cable to get it around the palm when working that part of it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Knitting, Absurd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.