Alucard's Gloves

Conforming to the Victorian tradition of reserve and refinement, Alucard wears a pair of white gloves. The departure from the restritive mores of Queen Victoria's England, however, is a rather evil-looking sigil imprinted upon each. Another interesting detail is the shirt cuff-style closure at the wrist.

Rather than making a pair of gloves from scratch, I decided to find a pair of gloves pre-made and modify them to fit Alucard's costume. Despite the apparent simplicity of that end, the gloves were one of the last pieces to fall into place.

My Alucard's Gloves

Though I toyed with the idea of making Alucard's gloves totally from scratch, I settled on finding a pair of pre-made gloves and making the necessary modifications for my costume.

Alucard's fairly complex sigil presented another problem, but I found an excellent Photoshop brush file out on the 'net that saved me the task of scanning and cleaning up my own copy (I had intended to use the image from the CD case for the soundtrack disc RAID).

Overall, actual construction took a couple of hours, making the gloves one of the quicker parts of the costume to be completed.

Materials List

• White men's gloves
• 1/2 yard white fabric for the cuffs
• Fabric coverable buttons (2x)
• Printer transfer paper

Design & Modifications

Once I decided to go with pre-made gloves, I thought the design considerably simplified. However, finding just a pair of basic white men's gloves proved far more difficult than I would have thought! Almost all had raised ridges on the back of the hand, so at first I tried a couple of pairs of women's "one size fits all" stretchy white gloves. Unfortunately, though small-boned I may be, my hands are still in proportion to my height and split the seams in women's gloves.

Just as I was about to go back to my original idea of making gloves from scratch (using a pair of sacrificed women's gloves as a pattern), I decided to see if I couldn't just remove the ridges from the formal men's gloves I had found... The ridges turned out to be made simply by loose stitching in long rows, and a seam ripper across the underside of each followed by a gentle ironing removed all traces of those silly ridges. I went with Finale Gloves' basic men's gloves in "large" (men don't get stretchy gloves like women).

Alucard's sigil came from a Photoshop brush file I found online with both the sigil and the sign on Paladin Andersong's gloves, which I stamped into a 600 dpi image and printed onto transfer paper to be ironed onto the gloves.

The cuffs are simple strips of white fabric with a buttonhole and fabric-covered button for closure.

Assembly & Construction

Once I had removed the ridges from the gloves, all I had to do was transfer the design for the sigil. This task does require a couple of close attention items:

• Cut out the sigil from the transfer paper sheet leaving very little border; even the white areas will transfer to the gloves, and you don't want a big square of white visible atop the gloves.
• Do NOT follow the heat setting recommendations for the transfer paper if using nylon or other synthetics for the gloves--the iron will melt the fabric!
• Use a pressing cloth between the iron and the gloves. This will let you go a little hotter than the iron's nylon setting without melting the iron to the gloves. If possible, test to see how hot you can get the iron, because you want it as hot as possible without doing damage to the gloves through the pressing cloth.
• Place something hard and heat-resistant inside the gloves; I used the cardboard form that shipped inside the gloves on top of a slender board. You can't just press it on an ironing board unless you really want the thumb seams to ruin the transfer from below. A firm surface will also help in getting the transfer to stick.
• Press hard with the iron but be careful to make sure you aren't melting the gloves!

The cuffs were simply strips of white broadcloth backed with heavy interfacing, doubled over, and sewn shut (right-sides together, obviously) and turned right-side-out, pressed, and sewn to the bottom edge of the glove's wrist opening. A buttonhole in one end and a fabric-covered button complete the assembly!

The photo below shows one complete glove and the other awaiting its cuff attachment.

Finished Gloves