We report on the design and initial evaluation of two methods for short text input in wearable computing applications using hand gestures. A wireless data glove able to recognize 4 basic gestures is used together with the chording principle. We present two different concepts to map gestures to characters. A presentation of preliminary experiment results shows that simple free hand gestures in combination with different key maps are easier to learn and allow faster typing than distinct gestures assigned for each character. Keywords Text Input, Gesture, Chording, Wearable Computing ACM Classification Keywords H5.2. [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces - Input devices and strategies.