the forest moon

I'm making Dave some flip-top mittens. I've had the yarn and the pattern picked out for over a year (two?), but the activation barrier to actually wind the yarn was simply too much. I know, le sigh. Also, my having never actually finished a pair of gloves before was kind of standing in the way. Now that I've got those stranded mitts under my belt, I'm feeling pretty confident about these guys. 

Like the last mitts, I'm using magic loop on a size 8 needle, single ply wool yarn that has a thick-and-thin tendency, and there's a generous garter stitch cuff. Unlike those mitts, these are worked from cuff to tip and there is no provision for fingers. Reading through the pattern and some of the comments, I knew I was going to at least figure out how to lengthen the section that goes inside the flip top so there would be no gaping at the palm. I asked Dave if he would rather have fingers or one big tube and he chose fingers. Of course. But to be honest, I think I'd prefer it that way too. It's just going to be harder given that I've never knit fingers bottom up before. It would have been too easy to just look up some patterns and adapt the instructions, so of course silly me I improvised. I fought with these last night, grumbled and groaned, but I think I managed to pull out something that will turn out decent. I even remembered to write down notes so I can repeat it for the left hand. The pattern would be nice and easy peasy without modifications, but we just have to be fancy and complicated here.

I'm going to weave in all those tentacle-y ends before picking up stitches for the mitten top to be sure the holes between fingers close to my liking before proceeding. Anyone have good ways to avoid those gaps? Are they unavoidable? 

Setting all process annoyances aside, now that I'm looking at these in the daylight I'm loving the colors! Dave thinks it looks like a sunset at the beach (he seems to think this a lot…) but I'm going with Endor, the forest moon. Look out for Ewoks, folks.