Shego Costume: Making Gloves (Part 4)

This costume has required me to learn a few new things that I've never had to make before, including: working with spandex, making gloves, and making attached costume boots.

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Making Shego Links

• Making Shego: Part 3 - Finished Body 
• Making Shego: Part 2 - Fabric Swatches
• Making Shego: Part 1 - Bodysuit

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For this post, I'll talk about making Shego's gloves.

So, just like before, I did some research before making the gloves. My Viking has a couple of books on making leather gloves, but that seemed overly complicated, so I went onto the vast knowledge of cosplayers on the intranet to find something a little easier.

Of course, after looking at a few tutorials, my reaction was "It cannot be this easy!" However, it was that easy, and probably only works on 4-way stretch spandex, because spandex is super stretchy. I would not use this technique on a tightly woven material, such as cotton or leather, and would probably default to our reference books.

Most of the techniques I found use freezer paper to stabilize the spandex. I didn't have any freezer paper so I just did what worked for me.

1) Trace out your hand. Make sure that your forearm is aligned with your index finger.  (I also marked out the location of my forearm, because the Shego gloves only go up that mid forearm.) I made two templates -- one right and left because my right hand is slightly larger than my left.

I flared out my fingers for a better fit. 

Shego's gloves flare out a little bit, I did the same for my template.

2) I added about 3/8ths" of extra seam alloance to the template and cut out my fabric (right sides together).

If I did this again, I would cut out a large rectangular piece of fabric instead and trace out the pattern onto it instead so that it would be easier to manipulate on the sewing machine.

4) Using my regular sewing machine, I stitched along the drawn line. Between each finger, I went a lot slower and made sure to make a "U" instead of a "V".

5) I tried on the glove to make sure it fit well, made slight adjustments.
6) I cut off any extra fabric. I made sure to cut as close to the stitches when cutting in between the fingers.

7) Turn right side out and hem the edges as needed.

Resources that I found helpful:

• Glove tutorial 1
• Spandex Glove Tutorial 2
• YouTube tutorial -- a bit more complicated method than the others, but if you have a more muscular thumb, this might work better for you.

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