The tops of my bare hands were starting to sting. But I kept chopping, ignoring the blustery north wind and 5-degree temperature.

“Hey Dad,” Julie said, coming outside. “Need any help?”

Julie and I earlier had decided we wanted to start a fire in the fireplace. So I was chopping some dead tree limbs in the yard to use for kindling.

I’d been at it for only about 10 minutes, but I noticed my fingers already were stinging.

“I should have worn gloves,” I said.

Burrowing her hands deep into her coat pockets, Julie watched. She laughed when I missed a branch.

“OK. That’s probably enough,” I said, dropping the ax and rubbing my reddening hands together.

Olympic dreaming

Last weekend’s single-digit temperatures have subsided. But the prospect of more winter weather had me thinking about gloves.

Brett Knight, a sales clerk at Sunflower Outdoor & Bike Shop, 804 Mass., blows air into a 180s sportswear brand glove that uses the Exhale Heating System. Knight, who orders gloves and accessories at the shop, said the Exhale gloves were Sunflower's best sellers.

I’d also been watching the Winter Olympics on TV. The high-tech, lightweight insulated gear the skiers and snowboarders were using made me wonder what new glove technology the Olympians were using.

Surely it also was available for the rest of us, who have to brave the snow, cold and icy wind without warm dreams of Olympic gold.

I checked with a couple of downtown Lawrence businesses that specialize in outdoor equipment.

Brett Knight orders accessories such as gloves for Sunflower Outdoor & Bike Shop, 804 Mass. Knight said there had been a lot of advancements during the past five years.

Glove manufacturers have come out with a “softshell” material that is virtually waterproof when the seams are sealed, Knight said.

“They’re real thin, real light and extremely durable as well,” he said.

The material is “kind of like a canvas-nylon-Lycra mixture combination,” he said. “It’s stretchy, yet waterproof and windproof.”

Knight said many companies had their own versions of the gloves. Sunflower carries the Mountain Hardwear brand, which sells for about $65.

“They’re great if you’re active,” he said. “If you’re real still they can get a little chilly because there’s not a lot of insulation to them.”

Warming it up

One of the latest developments in the past few winter seasons is the Exhale Heating System, Knight said. The gloves have a small hole on top of the hand. You pull back a flap and blow into it, warming the interior of the gloves with your breath.

The Heat-GX ski glove is made with Gore-Tex and has embedded heating elements in its fingers and thumbs.

“It has a liner on the middle which kind of keeps the hot moist air away from your hand so you’re not blowing directly on your hand but on a little layer that is built for insulation,” he said.

Knight carries the 180s sportswear brand of those gloves.

I found the Exhale Heating System also is used by Gorgonz, which makes outdoor work gloves. Many of the glove makers, like Gorgonz, also use Thinsulate insulation, which has been made by the 3M company for about two decades.

Doesn’t the moisture in your breath make your hands colder?

“Not really. Yeah, obviously if you do it often, it’s going to eventually get kind of clammy,” Knight said. However, the 180s have a fabric designed to “wick away” the excess moisture, he said.

At $30 to $40, the Exhale gloves are pretty popular, he said.

“They’re our best seller,” he said.

Warm and dexterous

I also asked Ryan Stewart, a sales clerk at Backwoods, 916 Mass., about the gloves they carry.

He showed me the Cloudveil Run Don’t Walk gloves, which have a Gore-Tex wind-stopping fabric.

“It’s my favorite,” he said. “Pretty much everybody I recommend them to comes in and raves about them.”

Stewart claimed that most people fall in love with the material because it’s warm and gives you more finger dexterity in the cold Kansas wind.

“They’re not like a shovel-the-driveway-type glove,” he said. “They’re fairly tight-fitting and they’re very stretchy. They’re thin, fleece gloves. I wear them when I run and drive. I can operate a camera with them.”

He said North Face also sells a similar glove, the Windstopper, although it’s more expensive.

Self-heating

I also wondered if there were any gloves that were heated by batteries, and found a pair on the Internet by Austrian glove maker Zanier, the Heat-GX self-heating gloves, for about $250.

Zanier says the Heat-GX is the world’s first ski glove with adjustable, processor-controlled heating.

Made with Gore-Tex, the glove has embedded heating elements in its fingers and thumbs. They’re powered by a 4-ounce lithium rechargeable battery that is contained in the glove’s wrist coverings.

You can put the settings on 86 degrees, 98.6 degrees and 131 degrees.

They’re sold in the U.S. by CozyWinters.com. But the gloves are apparently going like hotcakes – they’re out of stock until next fall.

Mittens on Mars?

I also wanted to see what the future holds, glovewise. So I checked into what NASA was doing to warm the hands of astronauts.

NASA actually is having a competition among companies or research groups to design a glove that will hold up in the cold vacuum of space or be used for future excursions to the moon or Mars.

The goal is to create a glove that would be flexible enough to do work that requires dexterity.

The winner of the competition, scheduled for late this year and early next year, will receive $250,000.

And who knows, maybe they’ll be fashionable on Mars in a few years.

Back to Earth

“How do you get the flames up higher?” my wife asked.

We were sitting in the family room, watching the fireplace with some of our relatives who were up for a visit.

And I took it by my wife’s question that I was supposed to tend the fire.

“Are you saying put another log on the fire?”

I laughed and started to head outside for more wood.

But this time I hunted down an old pair of gloves before heading outdoors.

As I pulled them on, I realized the material wasn’t high-tech. But it had been keeping us warm for thousands of years – good old-fashioned wool.