New Found Patterns for Newfoundland Mittens

When I first started looking at mittens in Maine and Eastern Canada, the traditions in Newfoundland and Labrador seemed unconnected to the rest. In most of the region, two-colored mittens have small geometric patterns that wrap perfectly around the hand. There are no broken patterns and never a different design on the palm.

Many knitters continued the pattern onto the thumb gore, with an unusual increase technique that makes the extra stitches appear almost magically without interrupting the pattern.

The mittens can be worn on either hand. Nova Scotia knitting historian Janetta Dexter told me that local knitters make only right mittens and twist them around to make a left, but in fact, the mittens are completely ambidextrous, a closed tube with a thumb and thumb gore.

Newfoundland and Labrador mittens are different, knitted with a striking pattern on the back of the hand, and palms in a salt-and-pepper pattern (k 1 MC, k 1 CC). The thumb gore, also salt-and-pepper, is often outlined in a contrasting color to simplify increasing. No need to have a set of multiple stitches around the hand. And there are right and left mittens.

The strong pattern on the back may continue to the fingertips but often stops at the base of the fingers, to be replaced with more salt-and-pepper, as if the knitter had a glove pattern she hadn’t bothered to adapt to a mitten.

The knitting is set up with all the back stitches on one needle and the palm stitches divided between two others, resulting in a very flat mitten that seems wider than ordinary.

Although it’s uncertain where this very different set of traditions came from, similar mittens are knit in Ireland, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, and possibly other North Atlantic islands. The reason they are not better known is that they are knit mostly as work mittens for family members and are seldom made for sale, while more finely knit, fancy-patterned mittens are on display in knit- goods stores.

The directions given here for both mittens and finger mitts are from Newfoundland and Labrador. The pattern on the back of the mitten is a mitten color pattern [as distinguished from the next, a sweater color pattern] from Shetland; the pattern on the back of the finger mitts is a sweater pattern from the Faroe Islands, but works so well on mittens

Made on comfortably large needles, with a relaxed gauge, both mittens are strikingly handsome and warm. They are still used as work mittens in Shetland and Newfoundland/Labrador.