Yarns: Boiled Wool Fingerless Gloves and The "Enigma"

      I'm working on creating Boiled Wool Fingerless gloves for my son Jon who lives in Maine and works as a carpenter on sustainable passive housing.  It gets very cold and he found the Boiled Fisherman's Mittens I made last year extremely warm and dry in the rain.  I'm using several patterns, most of them a variation of this WW II pattern - Trigger Gloves.  I'm finding this pattern the most helpful - Men's Fingerless Gloves.  In order to shrink them down, I'm making them a bigger size.  I'm using a size 6 double pointed needles instead of #3 suggested.  (More details on this glove - Yarns: Remaking WW II Fingerless Gloves and Finishing "One Day in December".)

     In order to create a glove that can be shrunk to the right size, I'm going on my experience from last year making Boiled Fisherman's Mittens and a couple of facts I gleaned from reading different posts online.  One source said that wool shrinks about 40 % vertically, up and down, and 25% horizontally, side to side (now to have it perfectly figured out you should swatch and shrink it, but I didn't want to waste yarn and my whole glove is a tester).  I know my son loves long cuffs so here I've done a super long cuff.  I'm going to see as I follow the Men's Fingerless Gloves pattern that by using a larger needle does it naturally make the glove long enough?  It's the length that will shrink the most and I know Jon likes a snug glove so I'm not worried too much about the width  He might ask that I not widen it as much, I added 4 extra stitches after the cuff as per instructions, but with the Fisherman Boiled Wool Mitts he didn't like it as wide.  So we shall see.  This is a tester.  Hopefully usable, but I'll be doing a re-do in better wool next time - KnitPicks Simply Wool Worsted.  Right now I'm using Patons Worsted Wool.

   Off reading another new genre, at least one I haven't read in decades.  I used to be a thriller reader, then I veered to Romances when I found after 50 I just wanted a happy ending.  Now with Book of The Month Club, I've been stretching myself and reading more modern fiction, probably future classics.  You do fall in love with a perfectly worded phrase.  But for Christmas, my husband gave me a book by an author I used to read Catherine Coulter called Enigma (FBI Thriller #21).  I literally read the first 2 in the FBI series when they came out a few decades ago.  I'm really enjoying it.  The whole series revolves around an FBI couple.  It starts with an escaped prisoner and then goes on about a stolen baby and a deranged man, both considered "Enigma" and I'm just getting an idea of what it's about 100 pages plus in.  But it's good, very good and because I missed almost all of the previous 20 books I have lots to enjoy in the future!

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