Other Viewpoints on Hand Coverings

Knitters in the 1600s and 1700s didn’t mind borrowing ideas and techniques to make beautiful warm hand-coverings for their families—even copying mittens found floating on the Grand Banks and lifting ideas wholesale from their Scandinavian neighbors—and North American knitting was heavily influenced by what others in the cod fisheries and the Hanseatic trading routes thought was useful. These are the basis of our traditional knitting today.

But today, the field of what’s out there is greatly expanded. Mittens and gloves sold in stores and by street vendors come from far away, not only from other countries but also from other cultures with different ideas of what constitutes a good-luck color pattern, what works for warmth, where to put motifs on a glove, how tiny one wants to knit, whether to have one finger free in a mitten, or two, and which ones—every possible different idea one can imagine.

The mittens and gloves in this section didn’t start out in Maine or even New England, but you will see people wearing them here, because they are fun, different, warm, or maybe just inexpensive and available.

The Inuit Sewn Mittens are perhaps the nearest to us geographically, and are here because they were the best cloth/leather mittens I could find, wonderfully tailored and warm, but also because Maine has a long tradition of cloth mittens, made of old wool coating, discarded hunting shirts, whatever was available—dating certainly to the Great Depression of the 1930s, but probably much earlier.

These were called “Hudson’s Bay Mittens” when I bought them many years ago in St. Andrew’s By-the-Sea, New Brunswick, both because they were made of Hudson’s Bay Company trade cloth, but it’s also possible the Hudson’s Bay Company contracted sewers for them. I have little background on these great mittens.

Mary Chase of South Brooksville, Maine, showed me the Polish Basketmaker’s Mittens. She had two pairs in her intriguing collection. These had an American connection in that she had purchased them at a New York City Polish refugee center shortly after World War II. I’ve never seen them anywhere else, have never met anyone who makes them, but, like the Nova Scotia knitter in the 1800s who copied a mitten her husband found floating on the Grand Banks, I went to some trouble to copy it, and would like to share it with other intrigued mitten makers. And, I would love to know more about it.

The Afghan Gloves showed up at street vendors’ stalls all over the East Coast in the 1960s. The young of those days, who included me, found them amazing and beautiful and I at least was fascinated with them because they had no clear starting point. The bind-off was definitely at the cuff. How could that be?

The first ones I owned are long gone, but I found photographs of similar mittens in Eva Maria Leszner’s Vantar…, and produced what I think is a reasonable facsimile for you to make.

The Gershwin Fingerless Glove that follows the Afghan Glove is what happens when two cultures meet on an artifact. I loved the motifs and the style of the Afghan Gloves, but figured I would go crazy if I had to make ten inch-long half fingers and attach them as I did for the Afghan Glove. Besides, interesting as knitting from the fingertips is, I still prefer to start at the cuff.

The original editor of Ultimate Mittens wanted an outrageous mitten to accompany the quiet, hardworking Maine designs. I chose the Afghan Glove design to add outrageous colors to, but you can make any of the mittens and gloves in this book in outrageous colors. I, who had to gather courage to paint my living room two bright colors, leave that to you.