Glovetopus: A Non-E Textile

Hi! Sophia here, from Dr. Peppler’s Creativity Labs. A few weeks ago, I used a couple of extra gloves lying around the lab to make a Glovetopus as a gift for a friend. A glovetopus is a cuddly undersea stuffed creature with eight tentacles. I bought a poster of directions to make one from the Bay Area Maker Faire this year. While a glovetopus is just a mere regular textile rather than an e-textile, I’d like to share with you my experience making it.

Here’s what I used to make the glovetopus: a pair of gloves, some matching thread, a needle, and scissors. Not pictured is the stuffing I used: tissues! (I didn’t have any cotton stuffing) I also used some white felt and black thread to make the eyes—but you can make the eyes out of anything you want.

According to the directions I got from Maker Faire, I stuffed the fingers first. The directions suggest you use a pen to push the stuffing into the gloves’ fingers, but I found my own fingers worked better. Then I sewed the gloves together.

Next I finished the stuffing…

…and cut off the wrists and thumbs of the gloves.

Finally I finished sewing the tops of the gloves together.

The next part is a little tricky: flipping the gloves inside-out. The best way to describe it is to see what it looks like when you’re done:

Because the friend I gave this to has a one-year-old baby, I decided to make the eyes out of baby-proof materials rather than googly eyes or beads that could be pulled off and swallowed. I sewed two little ovals of white felt on the glovetopus and made the pupils of the eyes by stitching black thread multiple times over the center of the felt.

Here’s the finished glovetopus! Say hello! :D

This was really easy to make and came out super cute. It would probably be easy to add a LilyPad LED or two to it as well. Highly recommended little project!