Friday, October 23, 2009

gloves/gauntlets

UPDATED: 10/24, with pictures

So, the gloves were a pain. The first one took almost 4 hours. The quilting takes longer than it should. Especially when you forget that sewing speed should affect the tension of your machine and the thread keeps shredding every time you finish a row. Sigh. But I think they look pretty good. I might put a more matte black paint because the gold with black Sharpie is still pretty shiny.

1) get those fingerless "wedding" gloves that I mentioned before. In black, of course.

2) use the gloves to trace out a pattern on gold tissue lamé. I have a picture of this to come. Instead of a tip, cut a flat edge of twice the width you want the hem to be. When you hem, you'll fold the edges down and the tip will return. Make sure to cut the pattern at exactly the same angle of the hand-part as the gloves above.
3) Spray glue the gloves to the stiffer fabric. I used black bottomweight cotton.

4) Spray glue the fabric to thin batting.
5) Using black thread, sew the shapes into the fabric, more or less quilting the fabric.

Try to keep the stripes small, although this will get really tedious when you get up to the wider part of the fabric. This is something I wasn't good at. tracing a pattern out would have been a good idea, but the disappearing marker I had for that purpose didn't disappear on the lamé even after 3 days, so I didn't want that there.
6) Hem up the edges. hem the hand part/point first, and then the rest. For all my hems, I'm staying really close to the edge, so they aren't right in the middle of the pattern. This means a lot of leftover fabric underneath, which is fine because it will probably unravel a bit, unless you've serged or double-hemmed, which frankly, I don't have the patience for at this point.
7) Color with a black Sharpie (a paint pen would probably be even better, or paint, but using the market was pretty easy because staying in the lines with the stitches to keep you in line is a cinch). Be sure you're coloring black the spaces in between the shapes, not the shapes themselves. I don't know what to call these shapes exactly. Hyperboles? (pics to come)
8) Put the black glove on your dummy hand, or some cylinder about the width of your hand, to stretch it out. The dummy hand is ideal because you can then sew in the shape of you wrist and everything into the shape.
9) Hand stitch the gauntlets onto the top of the black gloves, starting with the hand-points; they should be the simplest to sew, since you can reach underneath. I don't know anything about sewing techniques, but what I ended up doing was sewing over the top edge of the gauntlet and catching the glove and then looping back from underneath, if that makes sense. I made sure to only stitch over the black parts of the edge so they stitches won't show as much. Stitch the sides on, but you don't have to do the bottom edge if you've stitched the sides on tight and flat.
10) Get thin regular black gloves (I'll call them "hand gloves"). Leather might work, I'm not sure. Put those on underneath the gauntlet/satin glove combo. You might have to sew yourself a new loop to anchor it to the middle finger, depending on how thick the hand-gloves are.

2 comments:

Jessica said...

Hello, I know this is really late, but I've been following you on how you made your Illyria costume as I've decided to try my hand at it. I've never sewn any piece of clothing before with the intent to make an outfit/costume (I'll sew a tear in some jeans but that's about it) so I'm kinda having a hard time following the process on how you made these gloves.

Can you tell me a list of things needed? Im reading you talking about spray gluing the gloves to the thicker fabric but I just thought you had the gold lame and the gloves to use so I got confused.

My email is fireyelf_89@hotmail.com. It would be a great help for my Halloween costume this fall. Thank you

Carrie said...

haha, I'm both gratified and nervous that anyone is actually using my process for reference. I will try to remember what I did, and I'll send you an email. This costume is pretty much how I taught myself to sew. I'm still sloppy and not very good, but I got a new sewing machine shortly after this project (since this project pretty much did in the one I was using from my great-grandmother). You are wise to start this project so far in advance, but perhaps some of the desperation I experienced helped push me to the next level!

By the way, in case you didn't already do this, I think I tagged all the related posts so they'd all show up on one page and you can read my journey chronologically from the bottom up:
http://filiate.blogspot.com/search/label/illyria

As for the gloves specifically, I think this is a more succinct description:

Materials Used
--Black leather gloves (these don't ever get sewed on, I just wore them under the gauntlet part)
--Black Fingerless Gloves (the wedding kind)
--Gold lame material
--Darker, stiffer material
--cotton Batting

Instructions
First I made what I'll call the gauntlets. They fit around the top half of the forearm. One they were made, I sewed them to the fingerless wedding gloves. Then I put them on over the regular leather gloves.

So the real instructions here are on making the gauntlets. I more or less quilted them...the stiffer, darker bottomweight fabric, then the batting, then the gold lame. It was easier to spray glue these layers together then do the "quilting" just because a) I have no idea how to quilt and b) the lame fabric was so thin, it was hard to keep it from sliding around.

You might even skip the whole quilting part, to be honest. It added a bit of 3d effect, but not much, and it was super-tedious. So you could opt to just spray glue the layers, hem them, and then paint on the black pattern. My boyfriend did end up painting the Sharpie'd part of the pattern with black acrylic paint, and that looked much better.

So then once you have these gauntlets, which are roughly the shape of a rectangle with a triangle at one end, fit that to the top of the wedding gloves and hand stitch it on (making the dummy arm was pretty much indispensable for this part, if I remember).