Please don't hate me. I am a hacker and have been a hacker since I was a young child. Following directions has always felt too time-consuming. If I can figure it out on my own, I hack.I hack everything, from food recipes to quilting designs to sewing and knitting patterns. If you want to read about a quintessential knitting hacker, I suggest researching Elizabeth Zimmermann, going to the library and checking out her books. She will empower you to stop using line-by-line knitting directions and start thinking like a knitting hacker. What is our secret? We are visual thinkers. We see whole to part and then part to whole. Starting with a simple mitten:
The cuff: The rib pattern is based on 2 stitches, k1,p1 (repeat), I start out with CO 20 stitches when working on size 10 needles and CO 28 stitches when working on size 8 needles because I have a small wrist. I tend to try on my knit garments as I knit. I kept trying on the first cuff until I like its size. In the mittens, below, 2.5 inches covered my wrist.
The hand: Moving from a rib stitch to a stockinette stitch changes the length of the row. I decided to add two more stitches on the non-thumb side just to give it an extra umpf. You don't need to do this though. It is up to you.
The thumb gusset: I wanted a softly curbed piece so I am going to increase every two rows on each side of the thumb until I was happy with the thumb width. I tried it on and decided that 4 added stitches on each side was perfect.
BUILDING THE THUMB GUSSET: Start building the thumb gusset during the first row. My drawings are based on the Magic Loop method of using two needles but I also knit using double points. The Magic Loop method is easier to visualize since each needle holds one full side of the mitten. **I added one stitch on the opposite side of the thumb gusset, back and front, just to give the mitten extra room. This stays steady in my drawings below.
If you increase your thumb every row, it will be a straight line. If you increase it every other row, it will be a softer curve.
Keep knitting, after the proper width is established, until the height for the gusset is correct. Then, place the stitches for the thumb on a stitch holder. I have used everything from a large safety pin to a store-bought stitch-holder to waste yarn to hold the thumb stitches while knitting the hand.
A simple pair of mittens, made without a pattern. They look better on my hands since they are a perfect fit! (The lighting changed the mittens' color between the two photos. The real color is closer to the second photo).
More information:
Selecting the stitch to use to increase: I chose to pick up stitches, known as Make One Stitch (M1), because knitting front and back (KFB) to increase adds a hole that will become part of the design when it is done in a pattern (Every two rows in my mittens) but I wanted warm winter gloves that had no holes.
Selecting where to increase: I decided, on this pair of mittens, to add a stitch after the first stitch and before the last stitch on four rows, alternating the rows so the last added stitch happened on the eighth row. I have also used a marker, in the past, adding a stitch before and after the marker so the thumb gusset is more pronounced.
Straight line increase/decrease vs curve increase/decrease: A straight line increase/decrease vs a curve increase/decrease is part of the overall design. My simple mittens use a curve increase building out the thumb gusset and a curve decrease at the top of the hand. The closer the increases are, counting row distance, the straighter the line. I skipped one row between increases and decreases, which given the flexibility and bulkiness of the yarn, makes a soft curve.
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