How to Make Mittens Using Fleece

When it starts to get a little bit colder outside, I always find that some fun fleece fabric is always going on sale at the fabric stores and I always buy some and I never have projects to do with it because I can only have so many scarves. So I've made mitten patterns and today we're gonna make some mittens and I'm gonna provide the patterns for a small, medium and large size so you can decide which size that you need to make. So I am about the size of the medium hand. So you can see these are gonna be the mittens we're gonna make. And I'm calling these like more of an adult kind of mitten because they have a thumb gusset. Now, if you buy like a child's mitten, those usually can go on the right or left hand and they're interchangeable. In this case, we have a right and a left hand and that is made by this thumb gusset here. As you can see, it actually gives you a little bit more range of motion and is a lot more comfortable on your hand. So this is what we're gonna be making today out of this fun, fleece fabric. And I have just one of the pattern sizes here to just show you what the pieces are that you're gonna be needing. So I have the front, the back and the thumb gusset. Now on the pattern pieces, they will say, they'll have a measurement on there, either between six and six and a half inches, maybe six and a half to seven on up to eight. And that measurement is from the tip of your finger to your wrist is what you would measure to have this measurement here and that would tell you what size mitten you're going to make. So you can either take that measurement and then pick your pattern, or maybe if you already printed off all of the pattern sizes, you can actually just take your hand and lay it on your pattern piece. So you can see this is where my thumb gusset is going to be. So I'm just gonna actually put the pattern piece on my thumb like that. And you can see that this is much too large for my hand. Now we are going to use a quarter inch seam allowance. I've decided to do a quarter inch on this because if I stitch it on a half inch seam allowance, I would then just go back and trim it to a quarter inch anyway, so I'm gonna go ahead and just do a quarter inch to begin with. So keep that in mind that I'd come in a quarter of an inch there, but even that that's about an inch too big for my hand. So again, I would probably do that medium-size and in my case, I usually have some pretty long fingernails, so I want to make sure that I have enough room for those as well. So once you have figured out what size of mitten you're gonna make, go ahead and print off and cut out your pattern pieces and then cut your pattern pieces out of your fleece fabric. So again, I have here, just my front, my back and my thumb gusset. They're already sticking together, all right. So all I need to do is attach my front and back first. So what I'm gonna do is put right sides together like this, make sure everything is lined up. Go ahead and put a couple pins in place just because I find sometimes when I'm stitching with fleece if I try to pull it underneath my presser foot or pull it as I go, I might actually stretch my fabric and putting some pins every few inches or so really sort of helps keep everything nice and flat. So go ahead and put some in all the way around and then we'll take it over and stitch. Now, I like to use my conventional machine. It's the machine that I use for everything. It's the one I'm most comfortable with. If you would like to use a serger on this project you can absolutely do that as well. You could take and serge around this outside edge, which is what we're gonna stitch right now with a straight stitch. You could also, if you really want to encase those raw edges and you don't want to use a serger, you don't have a serger, you can actually do a zigzag stitch right along that edge. But because this is fleece fabric, I'm not worried about it raveling or anything, so I'm just going to do a straight stitch using a quarter inch seam allowance. So I'm gonna go ahead and do a couple of back stitches first to make sure everything is secure, and then I'm just gonna stitch all the way around the outside edge, but I'm going to stop when I get to my thumb gusset. So now one tip for when you're sewing curves like this one here is to actually not stop if you don't have to. The more you can keep doing it in a nice, easy, continuous motion like this you'll find that you have a lot easier time going around that corner than if you have to stop and start a lot, as you might get sort of little points of maybe your stitching got a little bit wonky when you're going around. So the more you can do it in just one nice, continuous motion, the better. So I have that stitched, take it off, clip my threads. And now my front and back is done, but I need to make my thumb gusset. Now this looks kind of like a little confusing piece because if you've never made mittens before, you've never made gloves or anything that has this little section, you might not know how this actually goes on there. So if you just sort of don't look at this bottom part right here, once we fold it in half you can see that that's our little thumb piece. So what I'm gonna do is I have my right sides together like this, again, I'm gonna put a couple pins in place to hold it, but what I want to do is I want to only stitch from this part here up into the fold because once we do that, then this right here is what gets attached to this right here. So we don't want to stitch this whole way because that would, that wouldn't work at all with our mittens. So we just do a stitch from right here around to where the fold is. Again, we're using our quarter inch seam allowance. And again, we will do our back stitching at the beginning and the end. Again, this is another curve that we're going to be stitching. I might just go a little bit slower on this one, but again I'm still gonna try and do as much as I can in nice, easy continuous motion. If I get to the top and I realized, you know, I'm just getting a little bit off, if I do need to stop, I want to pick up my presser foot, adjust my fabric and then keep going. But I find it's a lot easier to do curves, you can sort of just keep going in one smooth line of stitching. Do our back stitch to secure. And we have our thumb. So now at this point, we are again using that quarter and seam allowance. If you want to trim down any of these edges a little further, you can, you can simply just take your scissors and go right around that edge like that. If you think that that's gonna bother you inside your mitten, or if you're not gonna like feel that, you can go ahead and trim it down a little bit if you'd like to. So now what I need to do is I need to match my mitten with my thumb and I need right sides together. So what I like to do first to just make sure everything is nice and smooth. So I've turned my thumb right side out. Same thing with my mitten. I have this guy right side out. So you can see I'm going to be attaching it like this. So a fun way, like it's sort of easy way I've found to make sure everything is lined up is I'm actually gonna put this mitten on my hand and I'm gonna put the thumb on. Now I know that this is exactly what my mitten should look like once I get it stitched together. So I know everything is right. I'm going to pinch my thumb to my hand like this. And then I'm gonna flip this thumb piece inside of my mitten, just like that. So I have the area that I've pinched. That's my seams. Those are nice and lined up and go ahead and put a pin in place here. And that might seem sort of like a weird motion. You might actually have to do it a couple of times before you really get the hang of what you're doing, but you're just making sure you're matching up the right sides of your thumb gusset to your mitten. I'm gonna put pins in place all along this here. So there's definitely a place where I find that the pins help a lot because really there's only the one seam on your mitten. So you really want to make sure that the one seam is lined up. So the amount of pins you have moving up to that seam is really handy 'cause it helps keep everything in place. And then you may not need as many pins on the backside coming back down because everything will already be lined up from that seam. So one thing that this thumb gusset does is it provides that, you know, extra range of motion for your thumb. So you have to do a little bit of what's called ease to get your thumb in place. So as you can see here, I have, it looks like too much fabric for my thumb, but really what I want to do is start at the bottom here, put a pin in place and I'm just going to ease this fabric, sort of pulling it a little bit as I go to make everything fit and line up. So it may seem like too much fabric, but it's, once you ease it in place, it's actually just the right amount and having that little bit more fabric along the side is gonna be what allows you to actually move your thumb in towards the palm of your hand, without creating a pull along the backside of your hand with your mitten. So using a bunch of pins, you can see as I kind of pull this, it's gonna lay nice and flat those two pieces together and everything will line up. So just put in a pin, maybe pull a little more, put another pin in and everything will line up nice and easy. So can't have too many pins when it comes to this step in our mitten. Okay, put one more right up here and then we'll go ahead and stitch it. So now this is the part that's gonna be a little bit tricky. So mittens are pretty easy in construction and that there're only these three pieces, but this part, because we have such a steep curve we have to go around, is going to look a little complicated when it actually gets under our presser foot because it's going to be nice and flat, but then we're gonna have to flip it up to get around this part here of our mitten. So again, it's nice and flat and we flip it up to this part. It might be a little bit hard to see. So once you've done one hand, the second hand will be a breeze. So all we're gonna do is again that quarter-inch seam allowance and we're going to stitch right along. Did a couple back stitches. Can see everything's nice and flat to start. About the time I get to where my seam is, I need to actually start folding my mitten up as I go. Again, I'm just gonna continue folding it. And you really, you just kind of have to manhandle it and get it going exactly where you want it to go, making sure everything is still lined up. You've put plenty of pins in place so you don't have to worry about anything coming undone there. All you have to do is make sure you're getting around that curve. So once you get up and around it, then the second side is actually going to be a lot easier because it goes back to laying flat. So we are almost there. You can see now, now I'm on my other side so everything is nice and flat again. Just coming around that top part, everything seems to be a little bit more jumbled up. We'll just continue down and I'm gonna do a back stitch at the end like so, and then I can it off. You can see I've got my stitching. It's gone all the way around. I've gone up and over and then down the other side. Clip my other two little threads here and take out our pins. So what might have seemed like way too many pins for that small of a section really just helped us make sure everything stayed nice and lined up. Go ahead and turn this right side out, like so, like that and then put on my mitten. And again, this was a large size so it's a little bit too big for my hand, but you can see we have our perfect thumb gusset, everything sits nice and flat and I have a nice made mitten. So the only thing left to do now is to finish off this upper edge. So I'm gonna bring my finished one back in real quick 'cause as you can see on this one, all I've done is a simple zigzag stitch. I've turned under the edge, about a half inch and then just done a zigzag stitch. And the reason I did a zigzag rather than a straight stitch is because I needed that stitch to have just a little bit of give to it so I could actually get it on my hand. If I just did a straight stitch around there, I would risk popping those stitches when I'm trying to put my mitten on. So you can do a zigzag stitch at this stage. I could simply fold it under and stitch or you can actually do that step first if you think that would be easier. So I have some pattern pieces here where they're already cut out and everything, but I went ahead and just did my zigzag stitching first before I actually assembled the mitten. And then what I wanted to keep in mind when I was lining everything up is when I put my pieces right sides together is I would want to make sure that my zigzags line up, that they weren't off in anyway. So not only making sure that the bottom edges are lined up, but that my stitching is lined up too. So you can do that. And another thing that you can do is actually add some decorative stitching to the bottom of your mitten. So I've done some here and you see I did it in some black thread and some white thread. Now the problem with doing decorative stitching is that it doesn't have the give that that zigzag stitch had. So if you want to do the decorative stitching, I would recommend making a size larger than what you actually need for your mitten. So say I made this one here, this size here, because I wanted to have that decorative stitching. You can see this is really too big on me here. I don't necessarily want to add elastic to it because I still wanted to have a nice flat look here, so what I might do is actually take a button or something and I could make a little fold and maybe put a decorative button there. Maybe if I had a fancy button, something I wanted to show off, maybe even just a fun little appliqué patch or something, I could put that there and that would it to where I could either unbutton that, I could put a little snap there, just something to give me that little extra closure I need to be able to hold the mitten onto my hand if I want to do those decorative stitches. So again, you could use smaller buttons. You could even go so far as to put a large button on. You could even put a large button on, even if you didn't need it to be a functional button, just for something decorative. So whatever you do for one mitten, you would then just repeat for your second one. So you have a nice pair of mittens. They were really easy to make, they didn't require a lot of fabric and they're really a lot more comfortable than a mitten that doesn't have that thumb gusset, so it might seem like a pain to stitch around that. Saw it was kind of a difficult to get it under the presser foot to start, but really, once you have it done I think you'll really like the finished project. So if, you know, fleece is going on sale at a fabric store near you, definitely get some and try out these mittens.