Gloves

Regular Cleaning: To maintain hygiene and extend the lifespan of your cotton knitted gloves, wash them regularly. Use mild detergent and lukewarm water to gently hand wash or machine wash on a gentle cycle.

Air Drying: Avoid using a dryer as high heat can shrink or damage the gloves. Instead, air dry them by laying them flat on a clean surface or hanging them to dry in a well-ventilated area.

Storage: Store clean, dry gloves in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight and moisture. Avoid folding or crumpling them to prevent creases and maintain their shape.

Inspect for Damage: Periodically inspect your gloves for signs of wear and tear, such as holes, fraying, or stretched seams. Replace damaged gloves promptly to ensure continued protection.

Avoid Chemical Exposure: While cotton is generally resistant to most household chemicals, prolonged exposure to harsh chemicals or solvents may degrade the fabric. Use appropriate gloves when handling corrosive substances.

Choose Wool
It probably comes as no surprise that wool is best for mitten and glove knitting. Sheep’s wool breathes, it will wick moisture away from the skin, and it’s naturally insulating, making it ideal for keeping your hands warm. If your mittens get wet, the moisture is wicked away from your hands to the surface and will evaporate even in very cold temperatures, making wool mittens perfect for a snowball fight.

Tighten Up That Gauge
Knitted fabric is inherently quite holey: the little gaps between the stitches will let the wind through. The solution is to work more tightly, on smaller needles than you would for a garment with the same yarn. Use needles 2 or even 3 sizes smaller than recommended. Indeed, there’s no harm in going as small as you reasonably can, as long as the size doesn’t make the yarn difficult to work with or risks breaking the needles. The resulting fabric might be stiff, but that isn’t a bad thing for a full-coverage mitten.

Double-Stranding
For a warmer fabric—and a faster result—hold your yarn doubled. For an extra-warm fabric, you could also combine two different yarns for their different properties, such as smooth wool held double with lace-weight mohair. If you’re double-stranding yarn, there’s a quick calculation that can help you assess the gauge you might get and the needle size you might need. If you’re working two strands of the same yarn together, you can expect to get a gauge of about two thirds of the gauge of the yarn worked single-stranded. That is, if you expect 30 stitches across 4 inches (10 cm) in 1 strand of fingering weight, when you knit it doubled, you can expect a gauge of around 30 x 2/3 = 20 stitches in 4 inches (10 cm), which is the equivalent of a worsted weight.

Felt Your Knit Mittens
A felted wool fabric makes for excellent mittens that are utterly windproof and very warm. A felted fabric is fairly stiff and inflexible, so it’s best for a full mitten—it wouldn’t work well for gloves or lighter fingerless mittens.

Make a Lining
Another way to create warmth—and to combat the openness of a knit fabric—is to line the mittens. Kate suggests 4 options, each with different pros and cons.

Cabled Stitch Patterns
Cables are a classic way to create a dense fabric for added warmth. Crisscrossing stitches can close up holes that would otherwise occur between stitches.

Stranded Fabrics
And of course, stranded colorwork is the original solution to creating a warm mitten. The floats of yarn that sit inside the mitten create a barrier against the winds by blocking the holes and provide a second air-trapping layer of fabric. Cold countries such as Norway and Iceland have particularly long traditions of colorwork mittens and developed many beautiful traditional stitch motifs.