Left...Left...Left, Right, Left.

For the last few years I've been searching for a decent pair of ANZAC Day gloves.  For those of you who aren't from the Antipodes and can't be bothered following the link, ANZAC Day (standing for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is like our version of Veterans' Day.

ANZAC Day gloves are not a weird Australian tradition, it's just that the band I play with performs at the ANZAC Day parade in Melbourne each year.  That's me up the back:

 

Although we don't do the dawn service, it's an early start.  April mornings in Melbourne can be quite crisp and my joints don't like to get cold.  I'm a percussionist in the band and for me, ANZAC day is all about the bass drum.  I spend around three hours keeping the beat, loudly.  In order to keep on keeping the beat I have to tape up my wrists to stop the nerves from pinching.  I think you'll agree it's a good look:

The problem is that the taping is anchored on my palm.  Just ten minutes of drumming usually has the ends of the tape curling up and tangling in my bulky bass drum mallets.  So I have a number of requirements for my ANZAC Day gloves:  They need to keep me warm, they need to leave my fingers free enough to play and they need to cover my palms well enough to keep the scraggy ends of my tape covered and out of the way.

Now as a keen knitter, I already had a few pairs of fingerless to choose from:

Now the purple pair, made by me out of a beautifully soft possum merino mix my mum bought me from New Zealand, could be discounted immediately.  They clash horribly with my black, white and blue band uniform.  They are also a bit long around the fingers for drumming.  You can see from the photo that my little finger can barely peek out, no good for grip.

The second pair, knitted for me by my friend Elisabeth, made me more hopeful.  They matched my uniform so I wore them the first ANZAC Day we played at.   They were pretty good but the covered thumb reduced my grip and the mitten flaps, so useful in my cold and mountainous home town, were just too, well, flappy for drumming.  They did hold my strapping tape down well though.

This year I seem to have stumbled across the best ANZAC Day gloves ever.  They were a birthday present, again knitted for me by Elisabeth:

To begin with, they have an obvious and glorious musical motif, and in black and white they'll match pretty much any band uniform ever.  It gets better though, they are so low cut that all my fingers are completely free, but high enough to cover the strapping, leaving me wonderfully tangle-less.  This ANZAC Day, although I came away tired and sore from hours of bass drumming, my wrists were warm and protected and my fingers unemcumbered.

Here they are in action, what do you think?