Introducing Folk Mittens

“So many ways to make a simple thing like a mitten!” Nora Johnson exclaimed one day when I had brought her my umpty-umpth exciting, newly discovered old-time mitten. Nora is gone now. She died in her late nineties, but was until her death a constant support and inspiration on my hunt for old-time Maine mittens.

What she said is true, but more than true, because that’s the way of folk handcraft: It flows through human hands and minds, from one person to the next. It can’t exist without a person, and each person adds to or subtracts from the way it’s done to make the product her own.

The United States has had a major dose of worldwide folkknitting techniques in the past forty years, starting with Aran sweaters and ending, for now, with Bosnian socks. We’ve learned about Latvian mittens, Andean caps and ski masks, Cowichan sweaters and Swedish twined knitted sleeves. But you don’t find many of these items in use as they arrived on our shores. We adapt. We play.

That Bosnian socks don’t fit well into shoes doesn’t matter if the tradition isn’t your own and you want a pair. Add a round heel, a Kitchener stitched toe and you’ve got a dandy boot or ski sock. Aran sweaters too warm for the office? Knit one in cotton, knit one in a light sportweight yarn, and it’s fine indoors—an American aran (small a).

So it is with mittens, and perhaps more so, because mittens are hardly more than a swatch with a thumb. Their small format makes them ideal canvases for learning new techniques, playing with colors, or using fun techniques considered too laborious for larger garments.

So while Nora is entirely right, that there are “so many ways to make a mitten,” there are, in fact, daily, new ways to make a mitten or a glove to perform any number of roles. Tradition is never static, and folk traditions live only as long as people adapt them to their tastes and needs. Women who change and play with these designs aren’t reviving them, nor are they violating tradition. They’re participating in tradition and carrying it forward.

Even within folk tradition, there are inventions, fashions, shifts. The addition of the cuff to mittens in the last century is an example of folk innovation: the cuffs, called wristers, used to be separate, and mittens often had a thick band of pile called a “wind-stopper” to keep wind out of the sleeves (which also had no cuffs). The colors of Maine and Canadian folk mittens of the 1940s and fifties were garish, to be easy to see in the snow (I’m told). Those of the 1960s through the eighties were either subtle heather wools or harshly colored acrylics. The 1990s loved bright tweedy colors. Today, we play with bright solids in unusual combinations. The theme doesn’t change, but the particulars do, constantly.

Here, I offer what I have learned about making gloves and mittens, acquired from other knitters and mitten/glove makers, from people who wear them—fishermen, horseback riders, newspaper delivery kids—and from looking at old mittens whose knitters either have passed away without sharing their secrets or live too far away for me to visit. So far, Poland and Afghanistan have been out of my range.

Thus, mittens and gloves. I didn’t invent any of them: some were found, some were lost in time or place and found again, some were recreated from photos or old directions. I’ll tell you which.

Partake. Carry a tradition forward in time. Have fun.