Mending gloves

A while ago my husband found a pair of discarded gloves. They had holes in them: the seams of the thumbs were ripped, and the tips of both the index and middle finger were worn. Their original owner had given up on them, but I wouldn't let a pair of holes stop me. I took out some leftover embroidery floss, and got going with these worn gloves!

Mending the index and middle finger

To mend the index and middle finger, I wove over the hole. That turned out to be more difficult than I had expected: when you weave to mend, you need to have something sturdy underneath your fabric, something that helps you to keep the right tension. When you're mending socks, you use a darning mushroom to do so. If you don't have one lying around, you can also use a stone, for example. It just needs to be something with a hard surface. So for socks, it's easy. For glove fingers, not quite so. In the end, I used a tea spoon. That worked, but later on I realised that a carrot might have been a better idea. And still later, I learned that I could have flipped my darning mushroom upside down and used the handle, since that's exactly what it was made for. Ha!

Whip stitch for the thumb

To repair the seams of the thumb, I used a whip stitch a satin stitch that goes right over a seam. To get this right, it's best to arrange the seams in their original shape, with the right sides on top of each other. Sounds very logical, but it wasn't so while repairing these. For some reason, I managed to put the wrong sides on top of each other when repairing the left glove, and that's why it's a bit curly now.

Still, by using some leftover embroidery floss, I was able to turn these discarded gloves into a unique pair that can be used for years to come, instead of disappearing in a landfill.

Do you have a pair of worn gloves lying around? Feel free to drop me a line, and together we can find a solution.