Up-Cycled Sweater Series Part 3 - Arm Warmers and Fingerless Gloves Tutorial

I was planning on posting this with Part 2, but after the first two projects, I realized the blog was going to be way too long. So here's a straggler that really belongs to Part 2 with the accessories.

Arm warmers!!! Or fingerless gloves. Whatever you want to call them.

Here is the original sweater:

This was another sweater I bought during my thrifting extravaganza last week. 

The first step is to cut the sleeves. Make sure to give yourself more length than you will probably need to allow room for mistakes. I used the trimmed end of the sleeves (the end that is closest to your shoulder when you wear a sweater) for my hands.

Turn your sleeve inside out, lay your hand on the sleeve, and trace an outline with chalk or a white pencil. (Sorry I don't have a photo of this.) Sew the areas that you marked off with the chalk/pencil, and then trim off the excess fabric.

While your sleeve is still inside out, flip the fabric of the fingers and thumb over and hem them. After several practice runs on leftover fabric from this sweater, I came to the conclusion that hemming it straight across with a sewing machine was impossible without stretching the fabric out and losing the shape, so I ended up hemming the sleeves by hand.

Once the hem was done, I still wasn't happy with the finished product. The arm warmers looked too plain to me, so I randomly sewed several buttons onto the hands.

...And now I love them!

One note - the sweater I used was made from 60% cotton and 40% acrylic. I've come to the conclusion that this is not the easiest fabric combination to use. It was so stretchy, I struggled to keep their shape intact while sewing. I would recommend using a different combination of fabric because of this. :)