February fever and Esefen Gloves

Nearly missed February! Pancake night tonight as well. I have been busy organising Circles 17. This is a gathering of circular sock machine knitters. I did small events in 2012 and 2013 at the Framework Knitters Museum., getting 20 people each time - bit of a squash. Then in 2014 my pal Jane did an event in Coventry, only 7 of us but I w=think we all learnt a lot - the excitement there was one of the brand new machines from NZ. 2015 saw a weekend event in Bristol - 28 people. We all loved it, and sat around waiting for JO to do the same thing last year. She couldn't as she was out of the country. Summer and autumn have so many other textile events a date clash would have been inevitable. So we all sat around some more until last November I thought "Sod this" and went to look at a couple of local conference hotels and sent 80 invitations out. Now, a week before the event, there are 50 people booked in. Wow! I am not sure I will be any good at crowd management on this scale! The ever faithful Margaret will be by my side. So, I was frantically knitting socks to have in a "guess the yarn" competition. The only other knitting I was doing for myself was Esefen gloves. I had bought the book A Shetlander's Fair Isle Graph Book. One page was roughed out as the palm and back of hand patterns for a glove, entitled Norwegian. I called mine Shetland Fair Isle Norwegian, SFN, or Esefen for short. Looked up the word on Google and it exists as a type of Ibuprofen! For speed, the ribs and fingers were knitted on the Knitmaster. As usual, my tension is rubbish, especially where changing from one needle to another and there being a single contrast stitch on the edges.