I did a guage swatch on size 4 needles (pattern calls for size 5) and got 7.5 st to the inch. Since pattern guage calls for 5.5 st to the inch, I figured for a 7.25” hand with no negative ease (since they’re for a woman who is bigger than me) I would need 54 stitches.

WOW would those gloves be huge. Then I looked through the Projects and noticed that almost all of these pairs of mitts were either hugely enveloping or had comments from the knitters of how they made the mitts smaller or how they were very loose.

So I went with the original 48 st for a ladies’ Large and it seems to be working fine.

Mods: 3 rows knit before and after picot/turning row instead of 4. Decreased to 42 st instead of 40. Going with picking up 2 st in the gap between thumb and hand. Starting the 11-row lace pattern & finishing picot hem as soon as I start the palm of the mitt from the thumb.

Also, smaller needle size and same amount of stitches to achieve a Large instead of Medium.

Put on WIP pile for a while to knit some other Christmas gifts. Finished 12/23/11, and despite counting rows to match, 2nd mitt was 6 rows total shorter than the first. Had to frog out past thumb gusset and re-knit. BAH.