The beautiful designs on these mittens and gloves are not my patterns, nor are they new. They come from men and women in New England and Atlantic Canada who learned them by sitting next to a friend or a mother or an aunt, and watching. They learned the little peculiarities of increasing and decreasing that go with each mitten, learned the stories associated with it: how the mitten came into the family, what its colorful name means in relation to its geometric design.
In other words, these patterns are as much folklore as songs such as “Springfield Mountain” and “Calico Bush,” as much folk art as patchwork quilt patterns. In fact, many of them parallel patchwork patterns.
The people they come from are the early settlers of the coast, the French, the English, Scots, Channel Islanders, the Irish, and the Norwegians and Swedes. Those who came later—the Finns, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Russians, and others—seem to have dropped their own knitting traditions in favor of local ones, or simply gone over to purchased mittens.
A yearlong inquiry in the Maine Finnish community produced not one Finnish mitten, although Finland certainly has knitting traditions distinct from the rest of Scandinavia. What the Finns brought to Maine was the art of making cross-country skis! Old people from the interior still remember learning to ski on locally made Finnish skis, and Finnish women skiing into town, without poles, while knitting! What they knitted, I haven’t learned.
Nora Johnson brought her family knitting traditions to Five Islands, a village in Georgetown, Maine, from her native Farmington and shared these traditions and techniques with me and so with all knitters. Nora’s family patterns include Stripes, Salt and Pepper (which she called Snowflake) and Fox and Geese. Here she knits a three-colored Fox and Geese mitten, holding both yarns in her right hand as is common among American knitters of Yankee ancestry.The third color, used singly every sixth round, hangs loose below her left hand.
These patterns all have ties to Europe and the British Isles, often surprising ones. Many of the more esoteric qualities of the mittens knit by old Yankee families showed up in a book on double-knit patterns from the island of Gotland in Sweden (The Swedish Mitten Book, Lark, 1984). Some of the Newfoundland/Labrador patterns are known in Estonia, although Estonian immigration was not noteworthy in Labrador. A Norwegian star pattern showed up in the pattern bag of a knitter of English/German descent, who said it was British.
This doesn’t mean that English settlers picked up their knitting traditions in Gotland on their way to Maine, or that someone from Estonia settled in Newfoundland and set up a knitting school for young girls. Instead, it reflects the seagoing tradition of earlier centuries, the trade and codfishing links between all the North Atlantic communities. Mittens are not a drawing room tradition. They come from plain, hardworking people—fishermen, woodsmen, and farmers.
If women in Maine and Gotland knit the same mitten, it’s because a once widespread pattern has survived in these two places. Because no one told these knitters that stockinette cuffs were no longer de rigueur in mitten fashions, they continued to knit them and pass them down, while knitters in other more trafficked areas invented and passed around another kind of cuff—ribbed.
The British Isles and Scandinavia have a rich tradition of fishermen’s and farmers’ sweaters. Not so North America. When this country was being settled, these sweaters were still underwear and unremarkable in Europe, thus we wear woolen jackets woven of black and red, orange, or blue. The old knitting traditions that have survived and grown here are for smaller garments like mittens, socks, gloves, and caps, possibly because the handmade item is so superior to anything available commercially.
The mittens and gloves presented here are from my first two books, Fox & Geese & Fences and Flying Geese & Partridge Feet, and from Janetta Dexter’s booklet, Nova Scotian Double-Knitting Patterns. They are only some of many double-knit patterns in New England and Atlantic Canada. There are perhaps half as many again as there are knitters—other patterns, endless combinations of patterns, endless stories.
These are a few that Janetta and I and our readers like. Some are widespread, still actively knitted. Others are on the verge of extinction. But all of them fit well into today’s northern life and fashion.