Quickly Modify Your Gloves To Work With Your iPhone

After spending a bone-chilling week in NYC, freezing my hands every time I had to answer a phone call, I started looking for a solution to using this wonderful iPhone while not losing any digits to frostbite.

Turns out, there’s a simple solution: conductive thread.

The iPhone’s touchscreen is capacitative, where the slight electrical charge in our skin interacts with a slight electrical charge behind the glass screen. This point of interference is registered and processed. Wearing gloves insulates that electrical transfer from happening.

By adding conductive thread to the fingertip of your glove, the electrical interference is once again able to take place. Here are the super simple steps from Instructables.com

Supplies
You will need:
A glove.
A needle.
12″ (30cm) of conductive thread. (TIP: If you don’t want to buy a whole spool, you can buy a few feet much more affordably from SparkFun with the Lilypad Bobbin.)

• Sew a few stitches in the finger of your glove.
On the outside try to make the stitches pretty close so it only touches the screen in a smallish area (about 1/4″ or 6mm in diameter.)  This will help your finger touches be more accurate.

Tip: Don’t make it too small!  The iPhone, for example, will ignore small touch areas.  If it doesn’t seem to work very well, try increasing the size of the stitches on the outside.
On the inside of the finger, it’s actually good for it to be messy.
3-5 stitches should be enough.

• Leave some extra inside the glove.
You want to make sure the thread touches your finger or your hand on the inside, so leave some extra.  Leave danging thread on your knots, etc.  You might even tack a bit to the lining of the glove

• Repeat on other fingers (optional)
If you use other fingers or thumbs to use your screen repeat the step on them too.

That’s it! Not as accurate as glove-less iPhoning, but much warmer. Now, to figure out how to stop clumsily dropping my phone when I’m wearing winter gloves..