Illustrated tutorial: Making basic, no-frills wrist warmers and hand warmers (fingerless gloves)

Earlier this week I was in my office typing, and as often happens when I do this in the winter, my hands felt stiff and cold. I often wear regular hand braces when typing, which doesn’t have much effect on my hands’ warmth, but I remembered seeing fancier wrist supports on Amazon that offer compression, so I looked them up. The price was a little steep, so I started to browse through cheaper options when it occurred to me, “Why are you looking to buy something when you have the makings for hand warmers right in your sewing room?”

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember Lilo, the cat who eats fabric, and that she especially likes wool socks like these ones:

She also enjoys the occasional glove:

The latter was just begging to be made into a pair of Bob Cratchit gloves, and it wouldn’t even require sewing. I just  snipped off the rest of the fingers and that means the edges of the ones that Lilo had chewed up.

I did the same with its mate,  leaving the fingers longer so I could test out which length I preferred.

Then I set to work on transforming the socks into wrist warmers. First, I needed to remove the excess  fabric at the heel.

Working with the inside out, I pressed the top and bottom edges of the reinforced area of the heel together and drew chalk lines around the part I wanted to cut out.

I  lined the chalk lines up and sewed through them,  then cut off the excess fabric.

I turned the sock right side out and put it on my hand to determine where I should cut off fabric from the toes. I drew a line around the knuckles, took the sock off, and cut along the line. I had  not yet made a hole for the thumb, so I put the sock back on my hand, lining the “toe” opening with my knuckles, and drew a chalk line over the  joint where the thumb connects with the hand (aka the first phalanx of the pollex, if you want to get fancy). I cut a hole along this chalk line, repeated the steps for the other sock, and donned my new wrist warmers.

While I was at it, I decided to upcycle some wool gloves that had been attacked by moths. Silly me, I forgot to take a before picture, but basically I cut off the fingertips and used them to machine darn the holes, similar to what I did last week with the cashmere sweater.

So how do they work? I’ve been wearing them for typing ever since I did this, and my hands haven’t gotten that familiar chilly feeling once. And they all fit under my braces, so I don’t have did make a choice between warmth and wrist support.

None of them are particularly attractive, but since no one but Lilo usually sees me in my office, that’s not a problem. Maybe my next project will be making some for public wear (in the meantime, the purple ones will be good enough if the need arises).

In sum, I saved up to $40 with very little effort.  I should probably thank Lilo for starting this little project for me.