Nerdy

As you'll see on the sidebar, I'm halfway finished with Luke's Gamer Gloves, which are an adaption of Knitty's Cigar gloves.

Here's the first of the pair:


Keep in mind that my husband's hands are quite a bit larger than my own. That glove is pulled tightly around my hand and pinned at the palm so the Tetris block design is stretched out and shows up well. On his hands, the design is centered both vertically and horizontally. The fingers also fit, and the gloves don't reach almost to his elbows.

This is the right hand glove, obviously. I'm 5 rows into the second glove now. It will have a blue L-shaped Tetris piece on it. (L for left, or for Luke.)

He chose single Tetris pieces for the design because he wanted something simplistic, from a retro game, that wasn't instantly recognizable to the whole world. By themselves, these aren't automatically identifiable as Tetris pieces, at least not to non-gamers.

In order to be authentic, these pieces would both need to be the same non-descript greenish color, since that's all you got on the original Gameboy. But Luke wanted something a little brighter and more noticeable. So we went a little more modern for the colors. Which means this t-shaped piece actually should have been yellow, but he's not a huge fan of yellow, so we just went with red instead. Creative license. Most people won't know it's "wrong" anyway.

The matching hat will have 4 designs in a ring around the bottom: Zelda's triforce, Mario's P wing, an energy tank from Mega Man and the screw attack symbol from Metroid.

The P wing and the screw attack are a real pain in the butt to chart, let me tell ya. Especially when you keep either losing the chart or changing your gauge for the project, which changes the number of stitches allowed for each design. This will be the third time I've created a chart for this stupid project.

At least the triforce, the energy tank and the Tetris blocks are easy.

Oh, by the way, these gloves and hat are made from Patons Kroy sock yarn in a now-discontinued gray. The designs are added using brightly-colored embroidery floss, and the outlines are in black Knitpicks Essential/Stroll sock yarn because it was handy and I didn't have any black embroidery floss on hand.

I'll upload my charts to the blog when I finish, just in case anyone else ever needs to knit a P wing or an energy tank.

Oh, and by the way, these gloves are called gamer gloves for another reason, too, not just because of the designs on the backs. They're designed so that he can wear them while playing games. That's why I left off the tips of the thumb, index and middle fingers; those are the ones he uses most often when playing. His right hand is almost always either on the mouse or the right half of the controller, and that doesn't require the use of his ring or pinky fingers. Left hand is slightly different -- WASD games use the ring finger a little more and occasionally even the pinky -- but he'll deal.