A Series of Holes Surrounded by Yarn

How and Why Mittens Are Warm

Look at any plain stockinette knitting, a sweater in one color, for example. You will see that the shape of each knitted stitch leaves a little hole in the middle and another hole on each side of the stitch. Knitting is a series of loops—which necessitate holes—in a piece of yarn, looped onto other loops, which are looped onto still other loops. How did anyone ever discover that all these holes would keep us warm?

It is, of course, the combination of holes and wool yarn that keep us warm, with the holes holding “dead” air, one of the world’s best insulators. This works until the wind blows and the insulating dead air gets blown away. Often it feels as if the now very alive air has blown right through you.

This book could well be called “Knitting Is a Series of Holes Surrounded by Yarn and How Knitters Circumvent this Fact,” but that’s a pretty wordy title.

Sweaters and socks are covered by jackets and pants and shoes, which stop the wind before it reaches your sweater. But mittens and caps are usually not covered by anything. Fine and well for the head, which has top priority in the body’s warming system. Not so great for fingers, which cling to the bottom rung of the same system.

Our cold North Atlantic climate is not an ancient situation, except in Scandinavia and the Baltic areas. Our English, even our Scottish, ancestors were not accustomed to the bitterness of winters in Minnesota, Maine, or Canada, and when you read about the Pilgrims suffering through a rugged winter at Plymouth, bear in mind that they were inadequately dressed. While European winters, even then, were rainy, miserable times to sit in front of the fireplace, they were not the harsh and bitter seasons of the central and northeastern United States.

Knitters in cold climates have for several hundred years individually and together worked out ingenious ways to stop, plug, cover, and eliminate these holes in mittens and gloves, which are the sole protector of the hands from the wind, snow, and ice. While asked to be windproof and maybe even waterproof, hand coverings must also be durable, flexible, and able to grip—something not demanded of caps or sweaters.

Yankee and Canadian mothers and wives put their heads and hands to the problem, adopted ideas from Scandinavia and from their Native American neighbors, and devised means no one in the English-speaking world had ever thought of before to keep the hands of their families warm.

What emerged is a tribute to original thinking of women, and their ability to utilize qualities of materials at hand. All these methodologies still exist, although some have become fragmentary, and others have become less popular for various reasons, often having to do with the practicality of the product or the convenience or inconvenience of the technique. New variants of old techniques have risen, often out of a knitter’s ignorance of the work of others and the urgent need to solve a problem.

Mittens have been knit, crocheted, felted, knit and fulled, knit tightly, knit loosely and covered with cloth, woven like little baskets of yarn, lined with all manner of stuffing and surfaces, and sewn from cloth and skins. Hand coverings are knitted as mittens, as gloves, and as three or four transitional things that mediate between two facts: fingers are needed to manipulate things, but are warmer in one pocket. [This is the pocket of the mitten, not the pocket of your jacket or trousers.]

I found almost all of these mittens in New England or Atlantic Canada, although some of them came from far away to turn up in a New Englander’s attic, at a street vendor’s stall, or in a collection. In a couple of cases the mittens came from books—the Shetland mitten design was discovered by Ann Feitelson, a New Englander, in the Shetlands, but it looks so much like a Newfoundland mitten that the pattern transfered readily to Newfoundland mitten directions. The two color patterns from the Faroe Islands, Pine Needles and Eyunsstovu Slants, were never meant to be put on mittens, but they fit there nicely, even inspiring local metaphor.

Although this book may introduce you to technologies you have never before thought of using, they are not thought up by computer, but the human, usually female, mind working out of love. I have here the simplest and some of the most complex mittens—something for anyone who needs mittens and is willing to spend a little time and thought to create them—even if you don’t knit.