Joy Division Oven Gloves

Colin’s birthday is fast approaching and one thing I wanted to make him this year was a pair of Joy Division oven gloves. Let me elaborate…

We have both always loved the band Half Man Half Biscuit and one of their songs is entitled “Joy Division Oven Gloves” and is one of our favourites – here’s the track so you can hear it for yourselves:

So I’ve had the idea of making a pair of Joy Division Oven Gloves for ages. At first I hunted for a tea towel that had the ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album cover printed on it, but couldn’t find any such thing. I was hoping that with a tea towel or similar printed fabric I could make the oven gloves myself. But all my searches were pointless – why hasn’t someone come up with a Joy Division tea towel??? So I decided to buy a pair of black oven gloves and embroider the cover design on them. I knew this was going to take a long time to do, but stupidly left it to the last minute – but luckily Colin is up in Cupar most of the time at the moment, so there was no worry of him seeing what I was creating.

I started off by finding a really good image of the cover online and downloading this and printing it out. I then place then cut out the first part of the design and pinned the rest to the oven gloves and stiched where I had cut. I proceeded to do this for a few more lines, but it became too fiddly. I then opted to draw on the design with a white pencil and stitch over my drawn lines. This worked a lot better and was also faster. Here is the work in progress:

Photo’s of the finished gloves will be uploaded soon.

I managed to finish one oven glove and my fingers were so sore that I didn’t managed to stitch the same pattern on the other. Instead I opted to stich Fact10 on the other whcih is the serial number Factory Records gave the album within their catalogue filing system.