When my son J was younger, I made these cute little leg warmers for him from a llama and silk blend yarn that were so soft, fluffy, and warm. Needless to say, he outgrew them fairly quickly, but the yarn was beautiful and expensive, so they just gathered dust in storage because I didn’t want to throw them out and didn’t know what else to use the yarn for. Then during a closet purge, I found them again and pulled them up on my arms. And I realized they were the perfect fit. I thought about using them as wrist warmers, but I still had a skein or so left, so I thought I would use up the yarn and make them into fingerless gloves since my old ones were becoming a bit dingy.
This was the perfect small project since most of the work was already done and I just had to knit the part for the hands. I am not too happy with the color difference since the arm part faded over time, but I figure washing and wearing them will fix that.
I knit the original legwarmers bottom up, increasing as I went up closer to the thighs, so if I had to make these from scratch, I would start from the top and decrease. But I cast on from the bottom rib, knit a few rows, and began the thumb increase. I had a stitch marker and made an increase on each side of it in one row, knit a whole row, then repeated that about 9-10 times until it measured enough for my thumb. Then I moved all the thumb hole stitches onto a stitch holder and knit up the rest of the hand, finishing with a few rows of 1×1 rib. Lastly, I picked up the thumb hole stitches from the holder and knit that up too, also finishing with the rib.
That’s it! Super easy and quick. But seeing those baby legwarmers on my arms made me think about wrist warmers instead of gloves, so I am thinking about making a pair of those as well.
Here are links to this project on Ravelry and Pinterest.
