I had planned on doing a shirt tutorial next but I just can't stop thinking about gloves so in this video I will make two different pairs of gloves I made my very first pair of leather gloves back in 2018 and my second pair in 2020 and both of them were pretty bad after that I didn't make anymore until the Autumn of 2023 when I made five more pairs my sewing technique keeps improving with every pair and I'm still making very slight adjustments to my pattern every time I sew it up I really hope s
ome of you try sewing gloves they are not as difficult as they look the pattern fitting can be quite tedious but once you've got that done the sewing up is pretty straightforward also I made a mistake in my previous video I forgot to label one of the functional button holes on the beige 1720s coat even though I've made a coat with that exact same button hole Arrangement before and I'm annoyed that I can't go back and fix [Music] it my pattern is based on the diagrams from Dio's encyclopedia whic
h has a lot of volume spread out over two decades but this one is from 1768 it consists of a large piece called the Tran with fingers and a thumb hole a thumb which has indents on the sides to line up with that point at the top of the thumb hole which is meant to line up with that little Ridge of skin between your hand and thumb there are three v-shaped pieces called forets which go in between the fingers on my first version of the pattern I had these in two halves but after my first two pairs I
joined them together like they are in the Doro pattern it's nicer not having that extra seam there and there's fewer pieces to keep track of and a small diamond shaped piece called a quirk which goes in the inner corner of each of those forets these are in the DED pattern too and are also something I left out of my first pattern but I added them after my third pair and they were a huge Improvement the version without them is not horrible but it really doesn't fit well in that area with my garme
nt patterns I always make them so that the pattern itself doesn't include seam allowance but with gloves there's only about 1.5 mm of seam allowance at most so it's best to just include it in the pattern since I drafted my first version of this pattern back in 2018 I don't remember exactly what I did but I do know that I started by picking apart in tracing a modern glove and then making a lot of changes to it and that was a pretty terrible way to go about doing it especially since that glove did
n't even fit me modern glove patterns are so different from 18th century on that it makes more sense to start just by measuring and tracing the hand I wanted to film the patterning process as I would do it today but I didn't want to draft another pattern for me when I already have a pattern that fits me so this is Lee my friend from college who has hands and no glove pattern to fit them it's a shame yes so we're going to draft a glove pattern after checking my own measurements against my glove p
attern I started by measuring around the widest part of Lee's hand just above the thumb I was going to draw two parallel lines that distance apart but it turned out to be exactly the same measurement as the width of a sheet of printer paper so I didn't have to I drew a line down the center and traced Le hand on one side with the thumb near the middle of the paper trying to keep the pencil pointed straight down because the quirks extend slightly further into the hand than the traced lines I made
the gaps between fingers a bit lower than they are on the tracing I redrew the fingers to be more even but tried to keep the width and length the same for the width I guessed based on the finger circumference compared to how wide I wanted the forets to be which I'll talk about more when we get to the forets my forets are about 3/4 the width of the two middle finger pieces on the Tran which I think is nicely proportional the index finger is by far the widest one on the Tran because it's got a wra
p around three sides of that finger which only has a forchette on one side the pinky portion of the Tran also needs to be a bit wider because just like the index finger it only has a forchette on one side the one I drew here turned out way too big because I overestimated I drew the thumb hole by eye with the center about 1.5 cm in from the center of the main pattern piece on the palm side I cut out the finished half of the pattern folded it along the center line and traced it to get the other si
de because the pointy ends of the forchette stick down even further than the quirks do I cut the slits about 8 or 9 mm further into the back of the hand instead of just making a cut in the paper I'm removing a tiny rectangle of it because we're going to need the pen to be able to get in there to trace [Music] it I folded the pattern again this time along the center of the thumb hole and cut it out I tried measuring how much thumb protruded from the thumb hole and adding another 1.5 CM but that s
till ended up being too short I sketched out a rough thumb shape making sure it was the same width as the measurement around Le thumb knuckle and I rolled the cutout thumbhole piece around it to make sure it dipped in at the right point but then I drew it bigger anyways because otherwise the base of the thumb looked disproportionately small I had to go back and make the thumb hole a bit wider in order to fit it better when the thumb was finished I folded it in half and cut it out adding a little
Notch to Mark the middle of the bottom then I added back some extra to the bottom of the thumb hole because the thumb looked too flat by comparison I should have just traced a new version of the thumb and rounded it out more this was my first time drafting a glove pattern like this and I was just making it up as I went along so it's definitely not the best way to do it but it did turn out pretty good eventually the base of the thumb is still bigger than the thumb hole on the pattern pieces but
remember there is seam allowance included on these for the forets I needed to compare the circumference of Le fingers are the combined widths of the corresponding pattern pieces the combined widths of all my pattern pieces for one finger is about 1 cm more than the circumference of that finger that sounds like a lot of seam allowance for something so small but the middle two fingers have four pieces which is eight different edges that all need seam allowance so even though it's only 1 to 1.5 mm
it adds up I added 1 cm to each of these finger measurements and then subtracted the combined widths of that finger pieces on the top and bottom of the pattern here are some diagrams in case I haven't explained that well enough no need to SC screenshot them I have put them in the accompanying blog post which is linked in the description I drew a slightly curved vshape and made each side the same length as the finger it needs to attach to measuring the longer slits on the back of the hand because
these are the top seams on the fingers I numbered the fingers and each half of the forets but on my final pattern I just labeled the forets in the spaces between fingers instead of being a straight vshape on the inner Corner they curv down to make room for the [Music] quirks after cutting out the first forchette I traced the outer edge so that the other two would have the same [Music] angle for The Quirk I just drew a little diamond shape with with slightly convex [Music] edges you can also mak
e the foresets straight and split them down the middle like this I don't know when that started but as we'll see later it appears to be the case on the late 18th century gloves that inspired this project if you're short on leather it would make for a slightly more efficient cutting layout I've not actually used these pieces in a glove yet and we'll be interested to see if there's any difference in [Music] fit [Music] one more note about the fingers I've realized it's best to make the tips relati
vely flat because having a forchette on either side is going to change the way it tapers and if you leave the end two round you'll end up with this ugly little flappy thing it's all right over long pointy nails but will not fit smoothly over short ones although if you want to make your forets a bit longer than the finger piece so they meet in the middle then the rounder end is fine it's important to True your pie pieces after drafting a pattern but I seem to have forgotten to do that here with t
he exception of the thumb hole but the fingers will most likely need adjusting anyways and it's easy to change the length of them you don't want to make mockups out of real leather because that would be a horrible waste of money but thankfully Lee had this thin one-way stretch vinyl that was just perfect the stretch goes around the hand and I traced it in white gel pen because it's the only thing I found that actually leaves a mark on darker colored leather since this is the mockup I also wrote
the numbers on the pieces I didn't film the mockup construction because it was just like the gloves in about to show you only with much larger stitches and I didn't coose up all the fingers for the second version I traced the pattern onto card stock the index finger ended up being a bit too narrow and the middle two a bit too wide so I moved those lines over I redrew the finger lines where they needed to be wider or narrower and took some of the width off the side where it turned out to be too l
oose remember not to taper the wrist though you will still need to get the widest part of your hand through there when patterning the fingers it's best to air on the side of too long because you can easily trim down the tips when you're sewing them up but you can't add extra bits of leather on or you could but it would look really bad I don't like to fold my card stock patterns but this won't be the final version just like before I'm cutting out the half that I altered and tracing it to make the
second half with the only difference between the two halves being the slightly longer slits on the top of the hand I prefer to cut the thumb holes on my patterns with an xacto knife but there weren't any immediately available in the sewing room so I folded that [Music] too I added another 1.5 cm to the thumb and made it a little [Music] wider [Music] and made the four shets longer where they needed to be Le's going to sew this up in the vinyl again before making any out of real leather because
it will definitely need more little adjustments everything is so small in these patterns that even a few millimeters makes a difference success we have a pattern that fits or should fit better than the mockup next time it's sewn up and hopefully we'll have closed fingers yes definitely you're going to well you wouldn't stop there no no gosh no meanwhile despite having already made a lot of little changes to my own pattern I noticed that the seams at the base of the fingers on the backs of my glo
ves were pulling towards the thumb an awful lot so I moved the thumb hole in that direction by tracing a rectangle around it and adding 4 mm to the Palm side in the same direction as the the seams were pulling I cut around this rectangle flipped it over and taped it back [Music] in now the thumb hole is 4 mm further into the Palm I left my basic pattern short so that I can use it for late 18th century and also add larger cuffs onto it if I want to because there's quite a variety of cuff shapes o
ver the century in the last few Decades of the century coat sleeves were getting longer and Tighter so late 18th century gloves are pretty short most every every day gloves would have been pretty plain but on the fancy 18th century pairs that have made it into museums there's a wide variety of decoration and even more on the 17th century ones 17th century gloves are amazing and you should go look at pictures of them but for this video I'm going to make my own version of a late 18th century print
ed pair in the late 18th and I think even more in the early 19th century you see a lot of really detailed printed gloves including this delightful pair from the MFA Boston collection which is printed with light gray stripes and a black Medallion on the back they're from that l late 1780s to early '90s period when Stripes were the most fashionable thing ever and everyone was putting them on everything the mat also has a pair of ladies gloves with very similar Stripes I liked the idea of medallion
s on the backs of the gloves but I didn't want a couple embracing on mine so I did a dragon instead a lot of the 18th century European dragon images I found were just little wormy guys with two legs or no legs at all interestingly they don't seem to have as many reptile features as modern dragons do instead having an odd mix of bird and mammal Parts I collected a Pinterest board full of reference dragons which I will link in the description along with my glove Pinterest board I sketched from the
se for a few pages and then started trying to fit them into a [Music] circle I ended up with what I hope is a fairly generic looking dragon by late 18th century standards I used a piece of painters tape to make sure I got the exact size and placement that I wanted though I made the mistake of trying to account for the thumbhole alteration forgetting that the thumb seam would be in the same place on my hand either way now it was time to paint some samples my leather is this 0.6 mm undyed lamb ski
n from Italian skins on Etsy it's a nice weight for gloves but you could go thinner transferring designs onto glove leather is a bit of a challenge carbon paper doesn't work unless you press hard enough to shred the paper and the lines are awfully smudgy pencils barely leave a mark unless they're really soft and they're also pretty smudgy fine tipped waterproof drawing pens show up really well though so I went with the same method I used the one other time I painted a design on [Music] gloves I
traced it onto card stock using carbon paper and made a rough stencil that I could use to trace out a bunch of little chunks of the outline which allowed me to draw the rest of the outline with the right [Music] proportions after tracing a practice Dragon onto a scrap I had to fix a couple of spots on my stencil where the outlines weren't quite in the right place this is why it's always worth it to do samples it turns out this ink is also a bit smudgy if you touch it too much but the lines are v
ery thin and will be completely covered by the paint I'm using Angelus Leather paint and I chose dark brown because I think it looks better on natural leather than gray I can't get the line quality of a copper plate print with my little paintbrush but the practice Dragon turned out pretty [Music] good [Music] now there were only the stripes to sort out painting such tiny Stripes posed a bit of a problem because it's pretty hard to find 3mm tape that's suitable for masking I got some washi tape f
rom Michaels but felt bad about it because it's quite expensive and wasteful to use that just for masking this was the smallest pack at the store and it only had two tiny rolls in the width I wanted so I did a little sample in a wider size [Music] it did a great job of masking the paint but I wasn't sure I had enough of the smaller stuff should do both gloves and I didn't want to buy another pack but then I had a better idea I realized that instead of trying to find narrow tape I could stick a w
ide piece of painters tape to wax paper and cut it into strips as narrow as I wanted [Music] the sample turned out great even though I did it fairly quickly without measuring so I'm going to give the washi tape to a friend who will actually use it for its intended purpose with all the samples done it was time to trace out the pattern pieces leather has varying amounts of stretch in lots of different directions and when laying out your pattern it's best to try and make sure that there's more stre
tch going around the width of the [Music] hand I'm tracing the pieces with another one of those waterproof drawing pens since my my pattern has the seam allowance included I'll cut just inside the black lines so they won't be on the edges of the finished [Music] gloves [Music] I cut around the pieces very roughly before painting to avoid getting paint on the unused portions of leather and began and slicing up tape with a rotary [Music] cutter this was not enough and I had to do two more strips t
o finish the smaller pieces before masking the stripes on the Tran I first to mask out a circular area for the dragon I used wax paper to help with this too and Drew circles the right size with a [Music] compass I measured in from the edges to make sure I place both circles in the same spot without any edges to peel up I was obliged to use the tip of a PIN to sep separate the tape from the [Music] paper I outline them in ink before moving onto the [Music] stripes I started with the middle of the
thumb hole and worked my way outwards but starting from the very middle of the pattern itself would be good too I tried to make the spaces between the tape just slightly narrower than the tape itself I was doing it by eye so it's not all perfectly even but overall pretty [Music] good [Music] this paint dries pretty quickly so I took the tape off right after finishing each [Music] piece I started the thumbs from the middle too so the stripes there would line [Music] up I put the stripes along th
e width of the quirks but next time I'll do it lengthwise on both pairs of extent gloves the stripes on the forets Run straight along the fingers from the little bit that's visible in the picture of the MFA ones I think their forets are cut straight I at this time I had not yet made the straight forchette pattern pieces you saw me make earlier in this video and I still want to test those on a plain pair before I use them for something more time consuming so I just did my stripes in vshape otherw
ise I would have ended up with diagonal Stripes which I didn't want I taped them all on one side marked the center on the tape using mechanical pencil cut those ends off as marked and then taped the other side while I'm pretty certain that this is not how the forets were done on the original gloves it would have been entirely possible for them to do there are plenty more complicated printed to shape things from this era [Music] [Music] I pressed all the tape down firmly and a little bit of paint
still got under the edges in a few places where the leather is a bumpier texture but it's not too noticeable now I just had to trace my stencil finish drawing in the outlines and paint my dragons [Music] I covered up the rest of the Tran with a piece of wax paper just in case of paint accidents the print on the MFA gloves has a border of little circles around it i' sketched out a few different ideas including zigzags which were very popular at the time but in the end I went with simple [Music]
dots [Music] the paint covered up a good portion of my pattern outlines so before cutting out I had to go back and retrace the longer ones in white gel pen I was surprised by how much the leather had stretched and shifted since the first time I I trace the pattern [Music] pieces [Music] as I was peeling the tape off I started to worry that maybe all these high contrast 3mm Stripes would make it harder to see what was going on with the sewing and might possibly cause eye strain for some people an
d showing the process as clearly as possible is my main goal with these videos so just to be safe I made another pair of gloves in plain leather and film the construction of those instead I already had a pair of short ones in that color so these ones have the larger cuffs that were on the 1760s pattern and that way I could add a couple more things that I've never tried before for gloves with larger cuffs I tape an extension piece onto my shorter glove pattern I've been doing it this way because
I'm still making slight improvements to the pattern every time I sew it up and I don't want to make the same alterations to multiple different patterns I use painter's tape and stick it to fabric first to make it less sticky and it usually doesn't damage the paper just like before I'm laying the pieces out so that more of the stretch will go across the width of the hand and tracing the pieces with a waterproof drawing pen I have tried using washable markers for this but it smudges everywhere if
your hands are even the tiniest bit sweaty the dero pattern includes facings and I've seen examples of 18th century gloves both with facings and without I had never put facings on my gloves before but figured I should try it so I used my pattern extension piece to cut those using this pattern piece was a bad idea and I really should have made a new one the facings are a slightly different color because they're from a different hide I carefully cut inside all the lines leaving no ink on the final
pieces another thing i' never tried before is those three lines of decorative stitching down the back of the hand not all 18th century gloves have them but a lot of them do there's a variety of different looking stitches and some have little bits of embroidery there but I'm going to go with just one line of whip stitching there are some extent pairs that look like they have two rows but they also look like they're made of much thinner leather than what I have and the sample I did turned out fai
rly thick I sketched out the lines on my pattern and cut holes so I could Mark the ends and Drew them on with white gel pen so as not to leave a permanent [Music] stain to sew these up I'm using silk yarn which is not the best thing because it doesn't have as much twist as silk sewing thread and therefore won't hold up to wear as well but I have a lot of it I should stop doing that though I really need to order more silk Quilters twist I always wax my glove sewing thread I'm using leather needle
s for these but I have sewn up quite a few gloves with just a regular needle it's a lot easier with leather needles though because they have three flat sides on the pointy end which gives them little blades that cut through the leather regular needles can sew through leather this thin but it takes a lot more effort the one I'm using for this pair is size 7even which is a bit bigger than it needs to be I ordered some smaller ones but they didn't arrive until after I finished this pair for most of
my glove seams I don't tie knot in the end of the thread but I did for these ridges I'm using a PIN to help tie it because the leather needle would damage the thread my mother gave me these little Clips a few years ago and I never used them for regular sewing but they're perfect for gloves because you can't pin leather without leaving permanent holes my ridges are bit thicker than I'd prefer but I was worried about sewing too close to the fold with the size 7even needle I think I'll be able to
get a smaller Ridge with a smaller needle after I reached the top of the ridge I sewed back through the last hole a second time switch to a regular needle when you do this because the cutting edges on the leather needle will most likely damage your thread and make your tie off less secure [Music] I buried the end of the thread inside the ridge before cutting it off which would also be very risky to do with a leather [Music] needle now it was time for the facing and wow I really did not think the
se threw enough before cutting them out I should have traced a new pattern and made the CU slightly bigger to account for seam allowance and I should have made the facing piece even bigger than that in a lot of the pictures of extant gloves with facings you can see what appears to be a little bit of the facing rolled to the outside kind of like piping I thought scooching it a bit lower and trimming the upper Edge combined with the Curve around the wrist would be enough which was very silly of [M
usic] me I sewed the first facing on with whip stitches since they're fast and easy I should not have done it that [Music] way [Music] and for the second facing I used step stitching which is a bit slower but not too bad if this were fabric I would do back stitching but the leather would definitely hate [Music] that I sprayed some water on to help work them into shape but my poor pattern planning meant the little edge of facing wasn't going to sit as nicely as it could [Music] have I sewed down
the Inside Edge with large whip stitches being careful not to poke through to the outside of the glove [Music] [Music] I was having trouble getting them to stay smooth and flat and you're not supposed to iron leather so I dampened them again and left a heavy book on them overnight looking at the two finished cuffs the stab stitched one is way better than the whipstitched one it's so much smoother and the threads don't show at all I did do a sample for this but I guess I didn't make the whip Stit
ch portion big enough to see how bad it looked the thread wrapping around the seaml ounces made them a lot stiffer and they don't squish nicely into those inward curves which of course seems perfectly obvious in hindsight I was actually a little worried this would happen but was hoping I could get away with whip stitches because they're slightly easier to do oh well next pair will be better now for the rest of the construction where I actually have a decent idea of what I'm doing the most common
construction for thin leather gloves appears to be whip stitching with the seams left on the outside and that's how I've done all my pairs I always do the thumbs first in order to make sure that it's centered I lay my pattern back down and mark the middle on the back sides of the pieces where it won't be seen I fold the thumb in half with the wrong sides together and take a stitch through both layers just above the bit where it dips in I make sure that about 2/3 of my thread is on one side of t
he seam and the remaining third is on the other and then I tie those two ends in a knot I line up those two Center marks on the thumb and thumb hole and clip them together I line up the little point to the thumb piece and using the long thread I start whip stitching the thumb to the thumb hole I like to always put my needle in from the thumb side because leather can have a tendency to curve slightly around the tip of the needle as you push it in and this way any curving will happen around the th
umb hole I use a seam allowance of about 1 to 1.5 [Music] mm since the thread is waxed and the leather is pretty squishy it doesn't want to move once it's sunken into the seam allowance so if it's twisting off in the wrong direction it's best to guide the Stitch into place as you tighten [Music] it once I get back to the top of the pointy bit I switch to a regular needle so I can sew through the last hole a second time without damaging the thread and hide the thread tail inside the edge of the [
Music] leather then I can put the leather needle onto the shorter tail of thread and continue sewing up the length of the thumb you could sew it all from the beginning with one length of thread but the more you sew with it the more the needle eye wears out the thread so I like to divide it like this I used to start my thumbs from the bottom though which might be good if you're really worried about getting it centered or are working on a mockup and aren't sure yet how well it fits into the thumb
hole it's not how any of the exent examples I've zoomed in on were done and it does leave the seam looking a bit less tidy but it works I would Stitch through both pieces right on the center Mark again making sure there's about twice as much thread on one side as the other before tying both ends in a knot then I'd sew up one side of the thumb hole using the shorter end of the [Music] thread once I got to the pointy bit I'd switch to a regular needle and finish off the thread the same way as [Mus
ic] before I'd put the leather Needle on the other end of the thread and start sewing up the other half still putting the needle in from the thumb side shortly after starting this way it's a good idea to fold the thumb in half so you can line up the edges and clip them in place to make sure you're sewing the thumb in evenly on some previous thumbs I have gotten it skewed and then ended up with a twisted thumb where I had to try and sew a longer Edge to a shorter one then when you get to the poin
ty bit you can just keep sewing the thumb closed since this is the right glove I'm going to need to trim a few pieces down because I have to keep three of my nails short in order to properly sew with a thimble I've made the mistake before of trimming the thumb down at this stage without having the full glove sewn up and taking off a bit too much length I know this thumb looks fine but it just feels too short so I'm going to leave this end open for now and move on to the fingers each forchette ne
eds to go in its proper place and you should be be able to tell which is which by comparing them to your numbered pattern pieces you could even clip the forets to their pattern pieces right after cutting out before I can sew in the forets I need to attach the quirks I like to start my thread by bearing it in the edge that I'm about to sew over I line up one Edge Of The Quirk along one inner edge of the forchette with the corner of The Quirk about 1 m further in than the inner corner on the forch
ette when I start sewing I'm careful not to pull the thread out of where I buried it I'm just going through this Loop to help the first Stitch stay in place I so down that side and up the [Music] other then I switch to a regular needle so I can sew back through the last hole and bury the end of the thread inside the seam without damaging [Music] it since I still had lots of thread left here I started the next one with the regular needle and so through the first hole twice before switching to a l
eather needle it doesn't really matter which way you start the seam either way works and for these particular seams it doesn't matter which side you sew from for the first one I Put the Needle in on the forchette side and for this one I'm sewing from the cork side I always sew the foresets into the top part of the glove first the pointy end goes on the back of the hand I first line up the ends by putting at wrong sides together like this and taking a stitch through both pieces I make sure both e
nds of thread are the same length and then I tie them in a knot so they don't move just like I did with the second [Music] thumb I bend the forchette around and take a couple of stitches so that it stays lined up in the right direction and then I make sure the tips are lined up at the same height and clip them in place if your pieces are dramatically different lengths and you can't get them to line up without stretching one of them a lot you probably need to adjust your pattern but only if you h
ave that problem in the same place on both gloves if it's only really off on one glove then it's more likely that the leather just has a very uneven stretch or perhaps a cutting mistake if you just sew from the bottom of the seam without lining up the tops first one piece might stretch out of shape more than the other and unevenly lined up pieces can cause the fingers to twist I have a few badly Twisted fingers on some of the gloves I made before I figured out what I was doing wrong that's also
why it's good to sew from the same side while doing these pieces up till now I'd always sewn from the underside so when I was attaching the forets to the top of the fingers I was putting my needle in through the forchette and when I got to the bottoms the needle always went in through the Tran but as I wrote this I realized that that still leaves both seams twisting in the same direction on the index finger so I think from now on I'll always put the needle in from the forchette side on all the s
eams and that way they'll be as balanced as possible but lining up the tops before sewing is more [Music] important [Music] I'll leave a couple of centimeters open on the ends of the fingers here since I'm going to trim them down [Music] later here's what I mean about needing to sew from the same direction the seam is a bit twisted on its own but once you have one on either side with the thread slining in opposite directions they balance each other out if you sewed one seam from the forchette si
de and one from the Tran side they just get more [Music] Twisted once all those are attached I sew them to the bottoms of the fingers starting by tying the threads in the middle the same way I find it easiest to work from the index finger [Music] out [Music] I clip the fingertips together and clip the forets on near the tops to make sure they're lined up before I start lining up the rest of the [Music] [Music] seam I could have sewn up these last two fingers without trying it on because I know t
hey fit and won't need trimming but I left them open anyways if you're sewing up your glove pattern for the first time and might have made the fingers a bit too long if your hands are not symmetrical or if you're using a leather that's way stretchier than whatever you used for your previous pair of gloves then it's a good idea to do this but once you've sewn it up a few times and are confident in your pattern you should be fine just sewing them all closed without trying them [Music] on [Music] [
Music] now there's only the side seam left to do and when I lined up the Cuffs it turned out that my facings did not end at quite the same spot so that's another thing I need to mark on the pattern next time [Music] oops just like when I soed on the the quirks I'm starting this off by hiding the thread using a regular needle and then sewing through the same hole twice then I did that again on the next Stitch because this bit needs to be [Music] strong after that I continued as usual with a leath
er [Music] needle now it's ready to try on I think my thumbs are two different sizes this piece usually fits over the left thumb even though that one has a much longer finger nail the first two fingers needed about 4 mm trimmed off them including the ends of the forets Which is less than the length of my nails but it does still need to reach around the [Music] fingertip once the trimming is done I can finish up the ends of all those seams as usual [Music] [Music] on the left glove nothing needs
trimming so I didn't leave anything open a couple of my nails are broken at the moment because they're more fragile in the winter but they don't break very often and I keep them at a pretty consistent length of 1 cm so that's what I make the fingers to fit [Music] over and there we go gloves with no Twisted seams whatsoever and with no visible knots of thread on the outside the seam on the right thumb still feels a bit too short even though the left one fits just fine over a longer nail so I fin
ally decided to make a separate pattern piece for it and I might make a couple more because I have had the same thumb pattern piece turn out both too short and too long depending on the stretchiness of the leather if the fingers feel a bit narrow the first time you try our gloves on that's normal and as long as they're real leather they should stretch out to fit you perfectly after you wear them a few [Music] times they're kind of geometric looking when you first finish them but the more you wea
r them the more they'll mold to the shape of your [Music] hands as for the striped ones they went together in almost exactly the same way with the exception of the Cuffs I used nicer silk thread on these ones so I measured out all my pieces to try and minimize the amount of waste I'd measured how much I used on a previous pair of gloves so I knew approximately how much it took for each seam on these ones I seed the thumbs from the middle because I was worried about the stripes not lining up but
next time I make striped gloves I'll try them the usual away I also sewed them with a regular needle instead of a leather needle because at the time I didn't have any leather needles small [Music] enough [Music] since these ones are shorter and don't have those big round floppy bits the side seam starts at the very edge and there is no [Music] facing [Music] however the original pair in the MFA does have a hem I folded the edge under once and whip stitched it down and it was much tougher to get
the needle through at an angle than it was to stitch straight through but that was mostly because I wasn't using a leather [Music] [Music] [Music] needle [Music] I had never done a hem on gloves before because it's not really necessary on leather but I like how it reinforces the edge so it doesn't pull out of shape quite as much as my other gloves [Music] do I put my dragons facing inward so they can see each other and say hello because they are of course good [Music] friends oh I really need to
try and set up some sort of designated photography background with decent [Music] lighting [Music] [Music] here you can see what I meant about about the glove length changing with the sleeves the short later style of glove fits well with the long tight 1790s coat sleeves and the mid-century ones with larger cuffs work well with the shorter mid-century jacket [Music] sleeves [Music] I am delighted with how these turned out the main thing I would do differently is to just put The Medallion a few
millimeters closer to the thumb because I foolishly tried to account for the pattern adjustment when I shouldn't have and the fingers turned out a bit loose for some reason I know they don't look it but they could stand to be a lot tighter and it might be from having to redraw some of the outlines after I'd painted them the edges of these stripes are not all perfectly smooth because of the texture of the leather but I think it looks nice especially with the brown color scheme the rough edges loo
k kind of intentional these are very tiny complaints though everything else is great and as I already said I like the Hem and I might go back and hem my other short gloves if I had put the stripes lengthwise on the quirks they would have Blended in a lot better but I think they look nice this way too kind of like the cow catcher on a train uh and the plain ones were a learning experience but they're not too bad and I know that next time I do cuff facings it'll be a lot better and I even got a bi
t better at the regular construction part as I was doing these I think the stiffer cuff looks really nice and it would be fun to do one with a contrast facing I might add a bit of trim to these though so nobody at the grocery store sees my hideous left cuff and judges me for it the three lines of decorative whip stitching took a little bit of width off but not enough to make any significant difference in the fit as far as I can tell my pattern is still not quite perfect and I think I'll redraw i
t so that the fingers are angled in a bit more and a bit more of a flared wrist for the versions with the big decorative cuffs because this part right here is a weak point that I don't want to put too much strain on there are still slight differences in the fit of every pair even where I haven't changed the pattern and I think that's mostly just because leather has such an uneven stretch and just lots of directions this is only the eighth pair of gloves I've ever made and this is the ninth and I
'm sure I'll keep improving the more pairs I make I said in my intro that my first two pairs were very bad and I'd like to talk more about what exactly went wrong with them so that you can hopefully avoid some of those mistakes so this is the first pair of gloves I ever made and they are also striped mainly inspired by the MFA pair but also by some green and black striped gloves I saw in two different fashion plates from 1790 I have since realized that those ones are probably knit gloves because
Stripes going around the hand doesn't make sense with leather because it would be so hard to line up and there's a nearly identical pair of extant knit ones in the glove collection trust but I have also seen some plain green probably leather ones in fashion plates so I think green and black striped leather gloves are plausible but I'm not always going for accuracy that's not the problem here the problem is the materials I used for them they might not look that bad but they are instead of gettin
g new leather I used pieces from an old leather jacket which was decently thin and soft but it turned out to be really weak I tore one of the Cuffs very badly while putting them on not long after I made them but what's worse is the fact that I didn't have any Leather paint and I didn't think to buy any Leather paint so I very foolishly used green fabric printing ink on them not even fabric paint this stuff that's meant for screen printing on fabric which is very different from painting on leathe
r and it does not stick well to leather and on the samples it started peeling off so I thought oh I'll just coat it with something but still not wanting to buy any new materials I coated it with some kind of varnish for my stash that I think was meant for paintings horrible idea the bottle said it dries flexible but flexible does not mean the same thing as stretchy so of course it started flaking off which is what all this whitish stuff is and then the green started flaking off too these ones I
actually did mask with washi tape but it was from a different package that had a lot more of the 3mm stuff my second pair is better but still bad these ones were cut from an old suede skirt which was a nice thickness and a lot stronger than the jacket leather but has basically no stretch so they're technically wearable but they don't fit and they're not very comfortable I love reusing materials and sewing from your stash is great but I think the lesson here is that that doesn't always work you c
an make a waste coat out of any old garbage but for some projects you really need to buy the right materials and leather gloves are one of those things and the right tools get some leather needles and they will save your hands a lot of strain I also made a regrettable choice with these ones when I painted them with dye this was before I had bought any black leather paint but I had some black leather dye in my stash which was easy to paint with and my sample turned out fine but then on the actual
gloves it started smudging it's not showing up well on camera but it is smudged in several places I think it was because on the sample I did one coat but I did two coats on the gloves because I wanted it to be darker the dye also dried out pretty quickly and got really thick when I had it in a little paint palette so I think I ended up with too much pigment on the surface because of that I didn't notice the smudging until after I'd sewn them up and I tried fixing it by coating them with acrylic
resolene which did stop the smudging but it kind of ruined the texture they got a lot less breathable and a lot more wrinkly and there are some dark spots where it soaked into the seams but that part only happened because I painted it after sewing them up they also have that kind of tacky texture that acrylic finishes sometimes have where they're sort of squeaky and stick to themselves really easily it's diminished a bit with wear but it still just doesn't it still just doesn't feel as nice as
the plain leather gloves do naturally get wrinkly when you wear them but not this much I've worn these almost the same amount and these ones are so much worse so I do not recommend this stuff for gloves unless you're distressing a costume and want the gloves to look all gross and scrub scly also just to be clear these ones are not historically accurate and are not meant to be I based this design off a motif I found in an 1890s book because I think art nuuvo and mid 18th Century men's wear go tog
ether very well and I can sell whatever I want this is the pair I wear most often so I'm definitely going to make more and I'm going to use actual Leather paint this time and I'm going to make good versions of my first two pairs because I still want plain black ones and stripy teal ones do any Canadians watching I would strongly advise against buying leather from fabricville or Fabric Land depending on what province you're in I've only bought one hide from them and I will never do it again it's
this beautiful dark purple one and it's very soft and stretchy but it is so much weaker than the ones from Italian skins it's a lot easier to stick a regular needle through this stuff but some of the stitches on this pair are already tearing a bit and I've barely worn them at all and it stains really badly if my hands get wet in these gloves they will turn extremely purple and it's shockingly hard to scrub off to be fair I have not been rained on in gloves made of any other dark leather yet so m
aybe they all do this to some degree but if so I can't imagine it's this bad my fingertips were just grapes even sweating a little bit in these I still got purpled the fabric fill stuff is cheaper than ordering leather online but it's not worth it and a cheaper hide is still not cheap so I think it's better to get a good hide than to waste your money on a crappy one that won't last as long and you should usually be able to get two or three pairs of gloves out of one unless they're really long so
the price per pair is not terrible and neither is the price of thread for something so small so I really need to just order more silk twists and actually use it I don't know why I've gotten better at using up nice fabric but not nice thread I've made two pairs of gloves out of this purple one and I have enough left for one more and I probably will make another pair but I'm not happy about it if you have any suggestions for good places you like to buy leather from please leave them in the commen
ts because I don't know very many and please tell me if you know of any other marking tools that work on glove leather because right now all I've got is pigment liners for light colors and white gel pens for dark ones I'm pretty new to leather working and it seems like most of the information out there is about much thicker stuff so these gloves have been a lot of trial and error and I'm sure I still have more to improve on I've been wearing these a lot for every day and it's so nice as long as
it's cold enough out not to sweat in them I've been wearing gloves pretty much every time I leave the house they're not super warm but since they're a lot thinner than most modern leather gloves they fit nicely underneath mittens so you can take off your mittens and unlock your door without exposing your bare hand to below freezing temperatures and it's comforting to have them on when touching things like bus rails or crosswalk buttons or if you have to shake someone's hand because there is stil
l a plague going on when I go to the store I just keep them on the whole time and they don't get in the way of anything I have so much dexterity in these gloves I don't even have to take them off when going through a self checkout because they work on touch screens may I demonstrate on your phone I can't demonstrate on my phone because I only have a flip phone I like to wash my hands right before putting them on so the inside stay as clean as possible the light colored ones do get visibly dirty
on the outside pretty quickly I've tried using water and leather cleaner on them and that doesn't get all the stains out but it does help I'm going to have to go back and scrub the rest of these ones more thoroughly and get the whole thing damp because it left some water stains but you can see that this finger looks cleaner now I have had a pair of these get completely soaked in a rainstorm and they were fine I just carefully smoothed them out and propped them up so they wouldn't dry wrinkly the
y'll be stiffer after they dry but like a towel dried on the clothes line they'll soften up again once you move them around a bit however I do need to look into getting some sort of leather conditioner to replace whatever oils I might have washed away because they seem fine but I don't want the washing to weaken them over time I've read that you shouldn't use heat on leather because that also damages it I tried ironing a scrap on the hottest setting of my iron to see what it would do and it stil
l feels the same but apparently it can cause it to dry out and crack over time so I'm just going to avoid ironing them just because it doesn't instantly turn into a potato chip doesn't mean there's no damage and they don't need ironing anyways I hope some of you make some and if you do I would love to see pictures gloves are one of those things that were very common historically but are often neglected in costuming they're also the perfect project to take with you if you go out of town for the w
eekend because they're so small and there's no ironing or pins and they don't take very long I haven't time it yet but I think the sewing up is only about 10 to 12 hours okay I think that's it for now uh thank you to Lee for Lending me a hand and thank you to Julia for sending me these needles in this lovely needle book and thank you to my patrons for making this video possible and for making it so I don't have to panic about how few hours I've been getting at my alterations job my patreon is mo
stly dinosaur cartoons but I have recently decided that I'm also going to do monthly behind the-scenes post about whatever sewing videos I'm working on next remember to do samples we should both say goodbye so we and put that clip at the end of the video yes yes bye bye
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