Ive been trying so hard to understand the thumb gusset and I must be dense as I still after 1 year do not understand. Increase and descrease is confusing as well. I knit continential style so there are a lot of sites out there that confuse you. I ve seen the video on this site but it looks so easy but when I actually try for myself I reach a stumble block. My honey keeps telling me when will he see some finished product and I just keep unravelling. I learn by visual aids and not by actual text so one help me!
Are you having trouble with the actual increase or the gusset itself?
If it’s the gusset, put a marker on each side of the gusset stitches so you know to increase after the first one and before the second one. When you have the required number of stitches between the markers, you put those stitches on a piece of yarn.
When you knit the next round, you’ll be connecting the stitches and bridge the gap above the gusset to continue in a tube for the rest of the hand.
If you just knit into the front of the stitch as normal, don’t slide it off, and then knit into the back loop of that same stitch and then slide it off, you have a good basic increase.
Grab a pen and out the tip on your hand at the base of your thumb (way down the bottom, just above your wrist). Now draw a line up to the web between your thumb and next finger (this line will be approximately the same as if you put your hand down flat on a table and put a ruler along the outside of your first finger and then continued the straight line down to the wrist). Do the same on the other side of your hand. Now hold your hand with the thumb side toward you and the little finger away (like if you were going to put your thumb on your nose and wave your little finger at someone, just not that close). Do you see how the lines make an upside-down triangle with the point at the bottom of the thumb, where your hand starts to get wider?
If you made mittens from just a tube, the wrist part would fit but where your thumb makes your hand wider, the mitten would be too small. So when you knit that tube for a mitten, you start to make it wider by adding new stitches. If those new stitches were all a different colour, they would line up on your hand to make that triangle shape on the mitten. But they are usually the same colour as the mitten and blend in.
So if you are knitting from the wrist end to the fingers end, you start at the tip of the triangle when you reach it and you do 2 increases next to each other (because at the tip of a triangle, the two diagonal lines are close together).
When you come back to that row the second time, you increase twice again, on the outside of those two stitches. Because you increase on the outside of them, the increases are further apart, like on the triangle you drew: as you go away from the point of triangle, the lines are moving further apart.
If this doesn’t make sense let me know I will post a pic of a mitten where you can see the thumb gusset that should explain it much better.
Thanks. Here is what I am confused about. Here are the are the mittens that I am trying to make [URL=“http://www.knitting-crochet.com/2nee.html”]http://www.knitting-crochet.com/2nee.html
this is so confusing to me:Place marker between middle two stitches. (18 & 19th st) add two stitches, place another marker, Work in st st increasing 2 sts every other Row between marks until you have 14 stitches. Put these 14 on a holder for working thumb later.
You’ll place your marker, knit into the front and back of the next 2 stitches, place another marker.
On the knit rows, knit into the front and back of the stitch after the first marker and into the stitch before the second marker until you have 14 stitches between them.