You know what’s worse than the cold? Not being able to use your phone in the cold because you don’t have fancy gloves that work with smartphones. Of course you could go buy a pair of touchscreen gloves, but why conform to the 21st century?
Smartphones use capacitive touchscreens, meaning they register movements by picking up on fluctuations on the screen’s electrical field. When you apply pressure to the screen, it will only recognize the action if it has an electrical current. Your hand delivers these electrical impulses directly to touchscreens, but most fabrics don’t allow this current to pass through, thus why you’re old school-gloves don’t work.
“Touchscreen gloves” were developed to solve this first-world problem. They’re basically the same cheap gloves you have at home with conductive materials on the fingertips to transmit the electrical current, but overpriced.
Solution? Make ’em yourself. You don’t need to be super crafty to make these things. If you passed Home-Ec class, you’re good to go. All you do is sew some metallic thread (get a spool of it online for 3 bucks) to the fingtertips, and you can start texting away. If you don’t know how to sew, HouseholdHacker can show you how to do so in 5 minutes below.
Jamie Wisniewski 