A little project I thought would take a few days ended up taking all Summer and into the Fall, but now it’s ready to go into the world.
Here is my “Recovery Glovery”, art gloves for dermatillomaniacs, trichotillomaniacs, and everyone else. They’re lightweight stretchy cotton-spandex, designed for indoor use but can be used outdoors too; I’ve been wearing mine on bike rides.
Wait, did you say dermatillomaniacs? What?
Dermatillomania, also known as Excoriation Disorder, is compulsive skin picking. Trichotillomania is compulsive hair pulling. They’re a subset of body focused repetitive behaviors or grooming disorders. Lots of people suffer from them, but they remain poorly understood and seldom talked about. Some think they’re a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); others consider them a type of addiction, giving rise to recovery programs.
Light stretchy cotton gloves are one tool to help dermatillomaniacs and trichotillomaniacs settle the hands and relieve the tactile “triggers” that drive them to attack their skin and hair.
Gloves work! But they’re boring. If you’re gonna have fabric covering your hands, it should look cool. Hence, this project.
After designing, printing, and sewing 6 rounds of prototypes, I have made my gloves fabric available on Spoonflower, for which I get a whopping $1.40 per yard sold. I currently have no way to mass-produce gloves for sale, so sewing-your-own is the cheapest way to distribute them for the time being. However I kinda enjoy sewing them now, and will make small amounts of my handmade ones available for sale soon.
Currently I’ve only designed and sewn gloves to fit women’s more-or-less medium-sized hands. The cotton-spandex jersey stretches to fit a range of sizes (smallish to large-ish women’s hands), but there are limits. If there’s demand for it, I will make my next prototypes sized for men, or bigger hands in general.
Meanwhile you can order fabric here:
And here’s a sewing tutorial:
This is cool as fuck! I struggle with trichotillomania and have wanted to buy art from you, so this is killing two birds with one stone.
This is such a great idea. Cooler weather brings cracking skin around my fingernails. Constant attention to lotion. I use a nail file to smooth cracking skin. My hands are very small. But the cotton spankex would be something I could wear happily.