A Glove by Any Other Name

When the cold weather comes, I grab the gloves. Since I'm an addicted knitter, hand-warmers of all sorts have become favorite small projects, and my hands down (sorry) favorites are the fingerless "mitt" variety. I've made full-fingered gloves, but find that I'm constantly pulling them off to liberate my fingertips. The half -digit style seem to be more practical, but even those are a bit restrictive. Living in Northern California means that I don't need polar expedition handgear in the winter, so the completely fingerless version has turned out to be a good compromise between warmth and utility.

I haven't known what to call this favorite accessory of mine. It's inconvenient to lack a name for a ubiquitous part of my winter attire. Fingerless gloves has too many syllables, and seems to apply more to the half-fingered style. Sometimes they're called mitts, but I just don't like the sound. Glovelets is too cute and diminuitive. Gauntlets is better, but not quite right since it can refer to just the cuff, and has connotations of ancient armor. It's been hard to come up with a term I like.

Recently, I took a class in Sanquhar Gloves from Beth Brown-Reinsel, and I opted to make my open fingered version, partly because I'm such a slow knitter, but mainly because I knew I'd wear them more. My husband said that they reminded him of spats, so I called them Sanquhar Hand Spats, pictured here. I like that name, but there's another contender that I'm considering.

My good friend Sandy, fellow passionate knitter and sister of my heart, told me that the Sufis, Islamic mystics and dervishes, got their name from the woolen, suf, cloaks that they wore. The idea of sufis as in woolies came to mind as a handy name for my favorite accessory-without-a-name. The sound appeals to me, and so does the derivation. The fact that it isn't self-explanatory is a drawback, and someone is bound to see it as disrespectful to a beautiful and revered spiritual tradition, though I'm just trading on the older word for wool. Nevertheless, I like the name more and more as it tumbles around in my head. I'm working on a pair of sufis right now, and I'll post a picture when I'm done.