why are knitted gloves with unwanted long little fingers?

If you wear knitted gloves regularly when you work, often time you would notice long little fingers when you put them on your hands. Take a look at the following picture to see how long little finger look like on your hands. You can see they are annoying and definitely affect dexterity and reduce your work efficiency.

But why is the little fingers of knitted gloves always longer than what it should be? I will tell you why in the following section.

As you know, knitted gloves are made on glove knitting machine. The design and knitting pattern of knitting machine determines how these gloves finally look like. when gloves are finished on machine, the four joints between palm and four fingers are at the same level as you can see in the following picture.

Now let's look at human hands and examine how these four joints are naturally arranged. This is a photo of my own hand I took. You can see the joints for index finger, middle finger, and fourth finger are all at the same level except for the little finger. The joint of little finger is lower than other three fingers.

The length of glove little fingers are typically adjusted by manufacturers to fit the length ratio of these five fingers so as to have a better and natural look. So till now, we can make a conclusion of why we often find unmatched long glove little fingers:

• The gloves' four joints of index fingers, middle fingers, fourth fingers and little fingers are all at the same level.
• As for our human hands, the joint of little fingers are not at the same level as other three fingers, which is lower than them.
• Glove manufacturers want have a good-looking glove with matched fingers length ratio.

Just because of above three aspects, the glove little fingers become longer when we put them on. From manufacturers' perspective, a good-looking glove with natural little finger length may be better than gloves with shorter matched little fingers. But consumers might not agree, I think they would rather have one pair of gloves with shorter matched little finger length which is more ambidextrous.

Besides making glove little fingers shorter, we can use a new type of knitting machine to make a fit little finger without reducing the length. Over past a couple of years, glove knitting machine with new functions have being invented. Now gloves with lower joint position can be made. This function was originally invented outside China and was finally copied by Chinese knitting machine factory. As I know, some glove suppliers like Ansell, has put this kind of new function machines into action, but the capacity is still one question.