Beginner's Crochet Wristwarmers

So, you have a wool bag of old scraps of wool, little balls of wool too small to make anything. What can you make?


Something to keep your hands warm.



Here are my new wristwarmers. The "pattern" is so simple, that a complete crochet beginner could do this. I'd like a cashmere pair of these from Brora, but at £40-£50 pounds, I'm scared I'd lose them, so each winter, I make a few pairs of these.


Last year I did have cashmere home-made ones, lime-olive, as I call the colour - about the same colour as the pale green in these new ones. In Bruges, I washed them, and horror - tumble dried them - they made good pan scourers after that. Moral of the story - don't use unfamililar tumble driers.

Now, as Mr Prim likes to point out, I do have unnaturaly long fingers, so I don't want you to make them the same size as mine, because it is likely that they would be too big. I'll explain how you can make them the right size for you.

These ones, took 44g of wool. I know that because I weighed them on my kitchen scales. So a 50g ball of wool should make 1 pair. I used Rowan double knit wool.

I used a 5mm hook and cast on 30 stitches, but as I've said, I have unnatural hands. To make them your size, make a crochet chain which fits snugly around your hand between your knuckle joint and the first joint on your finger. You want to make sure that the bit of the glove which sits at the top of your hand is quite snug. Too tight and it will be annoying, and too loose and it will flap around. So make it snug but not too tight, and then chain another 2.

My initial chain was 28 plus 2 = 30, so the next row was 28 crochet stitches. If you want me to guess an "average" female hand, I'd say 25 plus 2.

The beauty of these wristwarmers is that all you are doing is crocheting a rectangle. You can use any crochet stitch you fancy. I used a half treble, but you could use double, treble, a shell stitch, like my ill-fated Bruges cashmere ones, or anything else which takes your fancy. You can make them in huge biggy wool (but they'll make your hands look huge) or you can make them in a very fine ply (which will take forever). Just make an initial pair in any old wool you have, so that you can see if you like them.

So you have your 28 stitches, or whatever is right for you, and you just keep going up, until you have the right length for your hand. Just keep counting the number of stitches in the row now and again. I crochet a lot, and I still make pyramid shapes when my concentration lapses, and I forget to count. Here's another wristwarmer, ready to be sewn up, just to give you an idea of the shape you are looking for.


Once they reach the correct length, sew in the ends which is tedious if you have made colour change ones like me, and then turn the crochet right sides together, into a glove shaped tube, and sew up, leaving about a 4 cm gap for the thumb-hole.
You can get a bit fancy,and do a single or double crochet round the thumb hole, or round the top and bottom. You could do a fancy border if you know how to do that.

Really, the beauty of this "pattern" is that you just make it up as you go along.