Make your own touchscreen gloves
Operating a phone in gloves is tricky unless you buy specialist apparel. Martyn Casserly shows how to make your own
In the cold weather you don’t want to have to keep taking off your gloves whenever you want to answer a phone call or check your email. But that’s exactly the scenario in which many smartphone owners find themselves. This is due to the fact that touchscreens work by interacting with the small electrical charges in our fingers, something that warm woolly mittens negate. Of course you can buy specialist gloves that will work happily with your iPhone 7 or Samsung S7, but if you’re handy with a needle then it’s easy to make your own. We’ll show you how.
What you’ll need
The materials for DIY Touchscreen gloves is about as simple as it gets. Aside from your gloves all you’ll need are a darning needle and some conductive thread.
Okay, that last bit is a little more specialist and might not be lying around the house. Conductive thread is, as the name suggests, one that is able to conduct the electric charge in your fingers. To do this it basically has metal properties woven in that allow a current to pass through. It can be slightly thicker than normal thread and invariably somewhat more expensive, but you can use it for a number of projects other than this one.
Sewing the fingers
There really is nothing more to creating touchscreen gloves than sewing a criss-cross pattern into the tips of whichever fingers you want
to use. Be sure to weave the thread in and out of the fingertips so that some of it touches your fingers and the other part touches the screen. Make a reasonable size grid if you can, as some phones will ignore small touch surfaces as they think there are just accidental brushes rather than intended actions.
Of course you won’t be able to use a fingerprint reader with the gloves on, so you might want to change your settings or remember your passcode before you head out.
Using your phone
With the stitching complete you can now put on your gloves and start to use your smartphone. It might take a little bit of adjustment to make sure that the thread is in the right place for your finger to press against it, but once that’s refined you’ll be free publicise your success on social media, even when it’s snowing.