49-Cent Friday Refashion: Fingerless Gloves Tutorial

I’m so excited to show you today’s refashion. I have been wanting to make these for the longest time, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have a serger…that is until now!

My parents got me a serger for Christmas and I can’t tell you how excited I was. I’ve been wanting one for forever!

I know you might be thinking, “Jen, Christmas was almost 2 months ago, why are you just now getting around to using your serger?”

Well, I’ve never used a serger before. I couldn’t just start using it without reading the entire manual and watching all of the informative dvd’s that came with it (twice).

I also had to purchase thread, and practice multiple times on scrap fabric before I felt comfortable enough to be able to use it on a real project.

To be quite honest, I also put off using it because I was a bit intimidated, but once I finally forced myself to try it out, I realized how silly I was being.

This machine is the bomb!

Isn’t she pretty?

The first project I made with it was 2 pair of leggings for my daughter.
That was a great first project because the stitches were hidden on the inside of the leggings, so it made it easier to get used to the machine without worrying that my stitches would show (They got a bit wonky here and there while I was warming up to it).
Once I finished sewing those I was confident enough to work on something where the stitches could be seen.

I knew that I would need several different colors of fabric for this project, so I chose these:

Yep, these shrunken sweaters just won’t do as-is.

I don’t know if you can tell from the above picture, but the red and grey sweaters have strands of sparkly silver threads woven into them, giving them a shimmery effect. I thought that paired with the plain black sweater, they would complement each other well.

The grey and red sweaters I was lucky enough to purchase for 49-cents. The black sweater was given to me…for FREE!
Each had shrunken up over time and needed to be refashioned into something more flattering.

Since I didn’t have a pattern for fingerless gloves (and didn’t feel like spending money on one), I knew I was going to have to figure out how to make these without one.

I started by cutting off the sleeves from each sweater:

Sleeves, check!

I trimmed the ribbing off the end of the sleeves that still had them. I can use those for future mittens I might want to make.

I’ll use these later.

Once the cuffs were removed, I opened up the sleeves…

…and then trimmed them into strips:

Strips!

Once I had enough strips cut to make two pairs of fingerless gloves, I started sewing them together.

Sewing strips.

This is how the first two looked:

So far so good!

Then continued sewing…

whirrr

Almost there…

I love these colors together.

After stitching all the strips together for both gloves, they looked like this:

lookin’ good!

I wanted to make sure they would fit good, so I took one of the sewn strips of material and wrapped it around my arm and pinned like so:

Custom-fitted.

Once it was pinned in place, I carefully slid my hand back out and trimmed along the pins:

Trimmed.

Then I took the pins out and placed the newly trimmed piece on top of the untrimmed piece…

Matching them up.

…and then I trimmed the other piece to match the top one:

Trimmed.

Once they were both trimmed to the perfect size, I ran both edges through the serger.

whirrrr

Then I folded it over and marked the spot where my thumb would go through to make sure I didn’t stitch that down.

Marking the thumb-hole.

After the thumb-hole was marked, I moved the pins over (so they’d be out of the way of the serger needles) and stitched all the way down (except for the spot for my thumb):

Ah, a perfect thumb-hole.

Pretty cool, huh?

After finishing off the second glove, they were all done!

I LOVE these!

If you’re wondering what I plan on doing with the rest of the sweaters, I have something really cool planned that I can’t wait to share with you. Stay tuned!

What projects have you been working on?

~Jen