San Diego Comic Con is right around the corner, and many of you are probably hard at work making your costumes (I know I am!). With this in mind I thought I’d try to offer some help in the most hated area of costuming - glove making. It’s a pain, it’s horrible, and you will probably fail the first/second/even third time you try. I know I still screw up making gloves, and I’ve made probably a dozen at this point.

The steps below are technically not the correct way to make gloves, but it’s my lazy way and it gets the job done. The gloves shown in the photos were made for my friend, Tally’s “Wasp” from Earth’s Mightiest Heroes costume.

Step one: Make a pattern

Since this was a last minute emergency for Tally, we made due with her hand traced onto some wrapping paper I had lying around. The measurements you see are the total circumference of my arm at those various locations, plus, the little wing thingy when we get to the top of the glove. (I forgot to take her measurements, as this probably happened at 2 am)

When making the pattern, be sure to spread your fingers out as wide as you can get them. With a proper glove pattern you would add fabric in between the two halves so make a tube, but yeah. That’s too much work for me! So just spread the fingers wide and follow along!

Step two: Mark your pattern onto the fabric

Here I took the measurements and drew them onto the fabric and then connected the dots. My pattern wasn’t to scale so I had to just draw it onto the fabric. If you are smart, and don’t do things at 2 am like me, you would have actually taken that 6 inch wrist measurement, cut it in half to 3 inches and drawn that into your pattern. I did that on the fabric, then traced Tally’s hand, and just kind of fudged the lines a bit. BE SURE TO ADD SEAM ALLOWANCE! I always forget that, and it sucks later.

Now, I do not leave the thumb in the glove because depending on the stiffness of the fabric your fingers could be stuck in this painful position. If you’re using a nice soft spandex, you could possibly leave the thumb and just sew the halves together. For this fabric I didn’t, and we’ll get to the thumb thing later.

Step three: Guide lines

Be sure to fold your fabric in half, so you can cut out the top and bottom of the glove at once. This is actually two layers of fabric that I will sew together later, but yeah. Don’t just cut out one half of your glove!

If you look by the fingers, I have drawn the guide lines for cutting out the individual fingers. This is really where it gets tricky, and you learn with time how to do this better (I still screw it up). The idea is you want to leave more fabric on the outside of the fingers to try to give more fabric to the inside middle finger. Notice how the pointer finger has a lot of fabric on the outside and the guide line is drawn closer to it than the middle finger on the inside. Work with the same theory from the pinkie in.

The middle finger is where trouble always occurs with this lazy way of making gloves, most of the time it will be too tight at the base if you don’t watch where you cut your guide lines. Your pointer has extra fabric on the outside. Use it, and give that in between fabric to the middle finger. It needs it!

Step four: Now we sew

The stitching here is done in yellow. Stitch on the outside of your lines as much as you can. You can always tailor the glove in later to make it smaller. However, it sucks to have to take out stitches, so just err on the side of caution and make the glove too big at first.

A tip to sew as close to the cut lines as possible while still using a machine is to take it stitch by stitch. Turn the wheel by hand and sew the base of the in between on the fingers. It will help you make that area as big as possible so your fingers will fit.

Cut away some of the excess and now you have something that looks like BALLOON FINGERS!!!! I flipped the glove over so you can see a bit better what the stitching looks like and how much extra I’ve left on the sides. It’s hard to see what’s going on with all that blue pen!

Step five: Liberation of the thumb

Remember how we didn’t cut in a thumb? Well, it’s time to let that sucker out! Flip your glove right ways and put your hand in. If all has gone well so far, your fingers should fit in their respective tubes. It will probably be a little tight, but workable. If it’s too tight, you can start over and move your guide lines accordingly. If you have extra fabric there, rip some seams and sew closer to the edge, or rip open those seams and just sew some fabric in between the halves to widen the finger tubes (I had to do this on the last glove I made).

Once your hand is fully in the glove try to poke your thumb out and then draw a hole there. I recommend starting small and building. Get enough of a hole to get your thumb out, and then feel where it is tight. Cut away the fabric as you go until your thumb is all free and happy.

Step six: Tailoring

Here’s where we try to get rid of balloon fingers and make the fingers shorter so they actually fit (I hope you cut your fingers too long as opposed to too short). Flip the glove back inside out and put your hand in, this will help you mark the points where you need to tailor.

Theoretically your left and right hand are pretty close to equal, so don’t worry about tailoring a glove to the opposite hand it will eventually be on when it’s right side out. Also, your fingers go from big at the base to small at the tip. If your glove fits awesome at the base, go from that point and make it smaller as needed at the tip. Mine don’t normally fit nice at the base, so I start this tailoring line about a joint up on my finger. I know the lines are a little tough to read here, but take a look to see what I mean.

At this point, you can really start cutting away the extra fabric. That stuff will make your fingers look lumpy and the glove will be tight (in a bad way), so trim it away as you continue to tailor your glove down to fit your hand

Step seven: Adding the thumb

I forgot to take a picture of the thumb piece. Sorry, but really it doesn’t matter too much. What I have here is a 6X4 piece of fabric with a bit of a bell curve at the top. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. You get your square on! Take this piece of fabric and pin it around the hole of the glove. Be sure you are pinning so the seams will be inside the glove and that the correct side of the fabric will be on the outside. I’ve messed this up before, and it’s really annoying!

Pinning in a circle sucks, but just force it and make it work. Oh, and have the opening of that fabric piece be towards the fingers, on the top side of the thumb. It just makes it point in the right direction and look a little nicer. It’s a little tricky to get this into a machine to sew, so feel free to hand sew this bit to make your life a little easier.

Then flip the glove inside out, put your hand in and pin the thumb to fit you. This can easily be put in a machine, so send it through the machine and finish that baby up!

TA DA!!! You’ve made a glove, and now your costume will look even more super awesome! Don’t worry too much if your glove doesn’t work out the first time around. Gloves are not easy. This is just a lazy person’s way of making a glove. The proper way involves putting another piece of fabric in between the two halves to widen the area for your fingers. It’s just a lot of tiny sewing, and I am impatient. So yeah, here’s the Kit Quinn way of making a glove!

If you need any more help or clarification on this topic hit me up in the comments and I’ll be sure to message you back!

Kit Quinn
Kit@ComicImpact.com