Acknowledgements

The debts of anyone working in traditional handcrafts mount up quickly. Everything I haven’t figured out myself, and even some of that, started with something a real person told me or showed me or with a book written or photographed by a friend, who thereby told me or showed me.

Thanks to Nora Johnson for teaching me how to knit with two colors without getting all tangled up, for giving me my first three traditional mitten patterns, for insisting that I do it right, and for showing me “the pull-up” in striped mittens, although she didn’t call it that.

Thanks to Mary A. Chase for giving me access to her excellently catalogued and preserved collection of traditional European and Maine mittens and gloves, particularly for the Double-Knit Fisherman’s Mitten knitted by her husband’s relative, Iantha Blake, and for the Polish Twined Basket Mitten.

I thank Birgitta Dandanell for being a friend and for introducing me to Swedish twined knitting, to Torbjørg Gauslaa’s work with twined knitting in Norway, to Mary A. Chase and the Double-Knit Fisherman’s Wet Mitten.

I thank the late Torbjørg Gauslaa, who taught me twined knitting and the spit splice and, without meeting or knowing me at all, invited me to spend a week in her home learning about twined knitting. Some of the photographs of twined knitting are of her demonstration samples.

I thank Kate Martinson for correcting my perception of Torbjørg’s spit splice and Eva Trotzig for introducing me to the ideas that literacy doesn’t equal intelligence and that illiterate knitters have much to offer us.

Elizabeth Zimmermann — Ah, difficult! Where to begin? Her percentage concept of sweater pattern design revolutionized my knitting and in this book is the basis for my system of proportional mitten sizes. Many of her nifty little “unventions” are incorporated consciously and unconsciously in every pattern I write and knit. She is deeply missed. Thank you, and good-bye, dear Elizabeth.

Thanks to Meg Swanson for years of encouragement to write about traditional knitting, and for the technology of her upside down I-cord gloves.

I thank Ann Feitelson and her Shetland Islands source Elizabeth Johnston for a wonderful old-time Shetland mitten, here called Shetland Ladders, and for permission to use it in this book. Thanks to Óluva Húsgar∂ and Nicolina Jensen in Tórshavn for teaching me about Faroese knitting and helping me to understand its importance in the Faroe Islands.

Thanks to Sarah Miller for her Windblock Mittens and their directions, which she gave me almost as they are printed here so that she could stop self-publishing them. A great addition to this collection.

I thank Briggs & Little employees Bernette Saunders and Patricia Gass for developing the Hearty Alternative Stuffed Mittens based on an article I wrote, and Jeannie Wild, somewhere in Canada, for her information on the expression and custom of “giving him the mitten.”

Alice Devine, Marie Litterer, Jenifer Hegarty, Adrienne D’Olimpio, and Alice Stewart kindly test-knitted mittens, trying out the patterns for clarity and providing useful critique. Becky Chapman, Holly Richards, Arlena Flick, Ann Tomes, Gerry Cosgrove, and Julia Bavers actually paid money to learn to make Polish Twined Basket mittens at Halcyon Yarn in Bath, Maine, thereby testing my directions. A similar workshop tested the directions for Afghan gloves — but produced mittens. Thank you all!

Bartlettyarns in Harmony, Maine, Nordic Fiber Arts in Durham, New Hampshire, and Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, Vermont, kindly provided yarn to knit the samples. Thank you, Russ, Debbie, Claire!

I fling to the four winds thanks to unknown knitters in Newfoundland, Kennebunk and Bath, Maine, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sweden, and Shetland for Rickrack stripes, Secret Fleece, Thumbies Plain and Simple, Ey∂unstovu Slants, Kennebunk Woolly Bears, and the rest. And to the women long past in Aroostook County Maine, northern Canada, and Poland who developed Inuit/Aroostook Sewn Mittens and Polish Twined Basket Mittens. Thanks to the Inuit women who, through their handwork, taught me about the proportions of hands and how to make leather mittens that fit.

Thanks to Down East Books and editor Michael Steere in particular for their patience in waiting for me to finish this manuscript. Thanks upon thanks to my husband Erik for helping me with the engineering of mittens, for teaching me how to find delta, which for him means one thing but for me means how many stitches to increase, take off for a thumb, and cast on over the thumb hole, for editing and checking my math — and for his gentle patience as I struggled (and struggled) to finish and to limit this book. “I like you the way you used to be,” he told me. “Before you were on deadline.”