Repairing and Caring for Your Mittens and Gloves

Knitters at Christmas craft fairs tell me that mothers don’t want wool mittens that can’t be washed and dried by machine. It may be true that they can’t be machine washed, depending on the mitten, but so what? How often do you wash your mittens? I wash mine and my children’s perhaps once a year, unless they’ve taken a tumble in the mud. I usually wash mittens and caps in the spring before putting them away, or in the late fall if I missed the spring. I wash them all at once, I wash them by hand, and then, if I have time, I mend holes and re-knit thumbs. It takes pieces of one day a year. That’s all.

Washing anything made of wool is scary if you haven’t grown up doing it. There are awful stories of Dad’s handknit Aran sweater thrown in the hamper, then the washer, then the drier, from which it emerged about the right size for the cat, who wasn’t interested.

Although it can’t keep the considerate family member from laundering what’s in the hamper, knowing the right and wrong ways to handle wool can allay fears about owning and washing wool. Hand-washed wool garments smell better than dry-cleaned ones anyhow.

Washing woolens, including mittens

Some old books suggest washing newly knitted wool garments in hot soapy suds: The writers weren’t trying to ruin your sweaters, but were telling readers what worked for them.

Washing in hot soapy suds doesn’t shrink wool: Changing from hot soapy water to a cold rinse might. Agitating wash water tends to shrink and felt wool. Lots of soap speeds the process. If all else fails to destroy your handwork, rinsing cold and drying hot — particularly by flinging the wool garment against the walls of a hot, small, windy enclosure — will definitely shrink and felt the garment.

Do you recognize the process as exactly what happens in the washer and drier? If you are lucky, it doesn’t shrink, like my daughter’s Scottish fisherman sweater her boyfriend kindly laundered for her. But don’t try it again, as, according to woolly urban folklore, the process is cumulative and what didn’t shrink today may well tomorrow.

Handwashing avoids these difficulties. You control the water temperature, the amount of soap and agitation, and the drying temperature.

To wash wool without shrinking:

1. Gather all the mittens, socks, and caps that need washing. This project uses lots of water and a little time, so the more the better. It takes less time, water, and soap to wash five pairs of mittens at once than five, one pair at a time. Fill a large basin (e.g., a dishpan) with comfortably warm water. Everything you do should be at approximately this temperature except drying, which can also be warmer or cooler.

2. Add soap or detergent — Orvus animal shampoo, a gentle natural shampoo, Murphy’s Oil Soap, Jen-til, or even Ivory Liquid or a fine laundry detergent. In choosing soaps, keep the scent in mind, as your ten-year-old son may not like smelling like lilacs. Mix a handful of soap into the water.

3. Immerse garments in soapy water and squeeze gently to wet them through.

4. Let soak for five to ten minutes.

5. Squeeze soapy water through garments, again gently. If the garment has never been washed before, you may be surprised at what comes out. Dark wool hides dirt well. Containing your horror, lift the garment out of the suds, squeeze — don’t wring — soapy water out and place in a dish drainer while you fill the basin with fresh warm water.

6. Immerse garments in rinse water, squeezing water gently through garment. Discard this water. Rinse again (and again), squeezing, but not wringing, the excess water out between rinses until the rinse water is clear. (Washers don’t make this quality check, and many “clean” machine-washed clothes are still full of detergent and dirt.)

Natural wools benefit from adding three tablespoons of ammonia to one of the rinses, or to the wash water: This removes much of the lanolin, making whites whiter and wool softer, but may also cut back on damp-proofing.

7. Lift the garments from the last rinse and squeeze, don’t wring, excess water out. You will not approach getting all the water out, as wool is probably the most absorbant fiber on earth.

8. Getting the water out the old way, which works: Lay the garments out on a clean terry bath towel. Cover with another bath towel, fold the edges in around the garment and the top towel, roll all three layers up and lean on it. Water will come out of the wool garments, and soak the towels. Repeat with fresh towels if the garments still seem very wet. You wind up with a lot of wet towels and semi-wrung-out wool garments.

The new way, which works wonderfully: Put the woolens in the washer on the spin cycle. “Spin” doesn’t agitate, add soap, or switch from hot to cold water. It does, however, centrifuge most of the water out of the garments, leaving them as close to dry as possible without being dry, and ready for the next step.

9. Spread the garments to dry (in a lukewarm place!) in the shade or indoors, on a woolens drying rack, a woolly board, a blocking form, or a piece of upholstered furniture. Wool takes a surprisingly long time to dry and a heavy garment may take several days to dry, unless you have spun it in the washing machine.

Wool mittens that will always be dried on the radiator can be dried there, but know in advance that the heat will probably shrink them, if not now, then later.

10. Tip: Some wool dyes run badly in the wash. Reds, blacks, browns, and dark blues almost invariably run. You can still handwash these in the same water with whites. Wash whites first, then light colors, then dark colors, taking care not to let dark or runny colors touch the lighter colors while draining. You can reuse medium-clean soapy water and use an almost clear rinse for one garment as the first or second rinse for others.

Putting woolens away for the summer

Many people carefully store their large woolens for the summer but ignore the smaller pieces. These also took time to make and until global warming gives us endless summer it’s a good idea to assume that winter will return in six months and your family will need their woolies again.

Perhaps, like my mother, you have a cedar chest and a cedar closet where all your woolens go on the first day of spring. You may store your mittens in a cookie jar like a grandmother I heard of in Massachusetts. Or your mittens may spend the summer in the same mitten cubby/basket/drawer where they spend the winter.

Whatever you do, you will learn the consequences of your actions. If you store damp mittens in a cookie jar over the summer, you may find them moldy, rotten, or moth-eaten in the fall. Mittens left out all summer are more likely to be moth-eaten or otherwise damaged than those stored properly. I speak not from self-righteousness but from sad experience.

The very best way to store woolen mittens, caps, and socks is clean and dry in a mothproof container made of a porous material like wood, ideally wrapped in acid-free paper. Second best is to mothball them in a bureau, trunk, or chest, or store them clean and dry in a plastic chest (Naptha is a poison, so if you use mothballs, air your clothing well before wearing.)

Toward the end of her life, my mother stored her small winter woolens, clean and dry, in zip-lock bags. In all cases, they will survive longest if they are clean and dry when put away for the summer. Washing removes both earth-type dirt that retains moisture and molds in the wool, and the acid that rubs off human skin and eventually dissolves wool.

The New England fine art of salvage

The first American-born man to be knighted by the British Crown was from Georgetown (now Woolwich), Maine. The achievement that garnered him such attention was the salvaging of sunken Spanish treasure ships for the royal treasury. William Phipps later had an adjoining town named after him, Phippsburg, which has remained thrifty and solidly Yankee to this day.

Salvaging and repair

Mittens used to steer sleds down icy hills and victims of other mitten abuse need fixin’. The options are tossing, darning, reknitting, patching, or layering them with mittens with holes in different places.

Tossing — throwing away — is an option, but others are cheaper and more effective. Darning, patching, knitting new thumbs and fingers take a fraction of the time it takes to make a new mitten, or even to buy a new mitten. Even re-knitting a mitten from the thumb up takes less time than knitting a new mitten. If you opt for repair, you’ll be surprised at how good the mitten feels without the holes.

Equipment for mending knitting: a darning or tapestry needle, some yarn, scissors, and a darning egg to provide a work surface inside mittens or socks. A smooth, round rock or a light bulb both make good darning eggs. For darning finger and thumb tips, a rounded dowel or a broom handle substitutes nicely for a darning egg.

Darning. A cousin I lived with during World War II told me his socks weren’t real until his mother had darned them at least once. In those terms, all our mittens and socks were “real,” and our mothers worked hard to make this so.

The day is gone for darning socks, probably the cheapest and least durable piece of clothing we wear today, but for handknit mittens, darning is probably the quickest way to deal with small holes that suck in snow and cold.

Darning worn areas that haven’t turned into holes. These are the easiest spots to mend perfectly and the results are truly stupendous. Unfortunately, no one but you will ever notice.

A duplicate-stitch darn works best on a one- or two-stitch hole, or on an area that is worn thin but has no broken stitches. The goal is to reconstruct the worn area with something that looks and acts like knitting.

Duplicate-stitch means duplicating the shape of knitted stitches with a sewing needle and yarn. Sometimes used as a decorative element, it is strictly functional here.

1. Using a yarn needle and the same yarn as the garment is knit from or a reasonable facsimile, fasten the yarn to the back of the fabric near the hole, using a running stitch through the backs of the knit stitches, then emerge on the front of the fabric in the center of a knit stitch near the worn spot. Follow the “thread” of the knitting, weak as it may be, with the new strand of yarn, duplicating its path exactly, across the worn area and a stitch or two into the unworn area.

2. Pull your duplicate stitches up just enough to match the tension of the original knitting and take great care not to break any of the worn stitches, as they are both your guide and a support to the fabric until replacements arrive. At the bottom of the last stitch across, bring the needle and yarn up into the bottom of the stitch directly above, then change direction and duplicate-stitch back across.

3. If your yarn runs out, work in the tail with running stitches in the firm part of the fabric, trim with about a half-inch tail. Cut a new 18- to 24-inch length and fasten the tail by a short running stitch in the strong area.

4. Repeat until the worn spot vanishes. Ta-dah!

5. Finish by working the yarn into the back of the fabric with a diagonal running stitch. Cut the yarn with a half-inch tail.

Woven darns are for biggish holes that involve many stitches, some long gone. A woven darn isn’t pretty, but it will keep fingers warm and will last until another mitten or a better reconstruction arrives on the scene.

1. Use a darning egg or a substitute. For a thumb or finger, use the end of a broomstick to support your work, a nøstepinde, or a rounded 1-inch dowel. I’ve used round rocks and light bulbs as darning eggs, as well as a lovely wooden one made by my great- grandfather. Use yarn the same weight as the knitting and a blunt-pointed yarn needle. Working right side out, slide the darning egg or its substitute into the mitten, then spread the hole flat on its surface so that the knitting is in the position you want it to be in when you’re finished. Stitch around the hole once in running stitch to support the edge.

2. Back up somewhat into the knitting, and come at one side of the hole in running stitch, take a flying leap over the hole, and continue a short distance beyond in running stitch on the other side of the hole. Turn around (the turn should be on the wrong side and repeat, placing lines of north–south running stitch and leaps as close as they can comfortably be without overlapping. Don’t collapse the hole by pulling too hard on the yarn.

3. When the hole and surrounds are covered in one direction, take a few stitches to bring your yarn to the long side of the hole, and begin crossing east to west, still anchoring the hole crossings with running stitches, but no longer leaping over the hole. Now, with your yarn needle, carefully weave in and out of the north-south leaps, keeping the weaving as close as seems comfortable. (On small darns, in and out are not always obvious, but you’re working with wool, and you can work in another strand later, correct as you go, or just forget about mini-errors. No one is going to judge your work except for its warmth, and within a week of its being brought back into use, the individual stitches will no longer be visible anyhow.

4. When the hole is completely woven over, work the yarn into the fabric, even strengthening nearby areas with more running stitches if that seems needed, then trim with almost no end at all. Ready to wear!

Reknitting

You can reknit anything piecemeal on a glove or a mitten except perhaps the palm. The finger and thumb tips and the finger portion of mittens are most frequently reknit, but the cuff can also be cut off and reknit, or, if the cuff is special and the mitten worn, you can rip the whole mitten to the cuff or simply cut the cuff off and knit a new mitten onto it.

When reknitting, you have a chance to change the mitten greatly. Has the owner grown? Make it longer. Has he/she complained about not having any finger dexterity in your lovely handknit mitten? Change it to a finger mitt. You might change a pair of gloves to mittens for someone smaller than the original owner. Knowing what you’re going to do before you cut off anything is important, as is keeping the second mitten intact until the first is dealt with.

If you hope to recreate the original appearance of a treasured old mitten, the yarn must be the same weight and ideally the same colors, preferably exactly the same yarn — easiest if you made the mitten yourself and thought to save some of the yarn for eventual repairs.

However, not having the right yarn is only an excuse, and any same-weight yarn works fine for reknitting, or even doubled fine yarn for replacing a heavier yarn.

Reknitting fingers and thumbs. Cut off the tip just above the lowest worn portion, then ravel down to firm, unworn knit. You may find a lot of stuff — sand, matted pads of yarn — emerging as you do this. Don’t stop to wash and dry it. You can wash it later.

If the worn portion winds up extending beyond the thumb join or beyond the fingers into the hand, treat the area gently, so as to destroy the fabric of the remaining stitches, and darn back and forth over it after you reknit the digit.

If you are ravelling the entire finger or thumb, as you go, count how many stitches are on the finger, since fingers and thumbs sometimes start wide for comfortable movment, then narrow for a better fit at the tip.

You can pick up the bottoms of stitches as well as the tops, but with two-colored knitting, picking up may be more difficult. Try to rip to a place with only one color per round.

Pick up stitches around on three needles and reknit the digit, duplicating any two-color pattern and decreasing at the tip as on the original.

If the mitten or glove has already shrunk, knit the new part a little longer than it was to allow for new shrinkage.

Reknitting cuffs. You can sometimes go either way with cuffs: Rip the original and knit it a whole new cuff from the bottom with the same number of stitches and kitchener stitch it in place on the open stitches at the base of the mitten.

Sometimes you can pick up the bottom of the stitches after cutting and ripping the cuff back to the mitten, and knit from the hand down the wrist.

Some ribbing, however, doesn’t rip from the cast-on edge. I do not know why. Something about the way the yarn is moved from front to back locks each stitch. If that is the case, and the mitten is important to you, you will have to cut open a stitch near the beginning of the hand, pick open a round with a knitting needle, and rip backward to the cast-on edge.

In most cases, only the edge of a cuff will wear and can be fixed by cutting the edge, picking back a round or two, then picking up stitches on three needles and reknitting and binding off the very edge. A bound-off edge looks a little funny at the beginning of a mitten, but the mitten will be intact. If the look troubles you, reknit both cuffs the same way.

It’s easiest to attach or rip to a round with no increases or decreases and, if possible, a single color. This may mean reknitting a little of the hand as well, but the result is worth the extra row or two. Try to avoid messing with the thumb increase, as that’s not easy to figure out and have it look right.

Reknitting in the wrong color. Problem: Janice doesn’t have time or money, but her little boy needs a new pair of mittens. She could repair his old green pair and make them a dight longer if she had the right yarn, but all she has is a brilliant yellow. Each of his grandmothers gave him a pair of handknit mittens for Christmas, one blue and one red, but he’s lost one of each pair.

Solution: The kid gets two pairs of mittens. The clever mother unravels the thumb and the fingertips of the two mismatched mittens, knits a new red thumb and fingertips on the blue mitten and a new blue thumb and fingertips on the red mitten. Then she unravels the worn thumbs and fingertips on the green mittens and knits yellow thumbs and tips on those. The kid was really mad at her. He wanted a new pair of navy Thinsulate gloves. But then he put them on. Mmm!

Patches. A locally famous Nova Scotia pattern, Mattie Owl’s Patch, was retrieved from the patched mitten of a native woman who came selling baskets at the door of a nineteenth-century mitten enthusiast. The woman liked the design on the patch so much that she gave Mattie Owl a brand new pair of mittens for her old one, and then sat down to knit.

When all knitting was done by hand and knitting yarn was handspun or expensive, it was common to patch old mittens with salvaged bits of other old knitted mittens or socks, necessarily well felted by use and washing. Woven wool cloth can also be used for patches, but is usually not as thick and lacks the flexibility of knit fabric.

The patch must be large enough to be attached on all sides to unworn yarn in the garment, or you may find the mend so much stronger than the surrounding fabric that holes will appear around its edges. If there is no unworn yarn to fasten the patch to, consider re-knitting the entire area, throwing away the mitten and starting fresh, or using the worn mitten as a model for a new one or for patches on other mittens.

To patch:

1. Choose a piece of discardable knitting approximately the same weight as the piece to be patched. Find a part that is nicely felted by wear and cut a piece at least half an inch larger in both dimensions than the hole. Slip a darning egg, or a facsimile, into the mitten. Smooth the fabric into its correct shape.

2. Pin or paste the patch in place, overlapping the hole by about a quarter inch on all sides. Don’t worry about turning the edges under: felted knits seldom ravel. Using a yarn the same thickness, or lighter, and of an inconspicuous color, invisible stitch, overhand stich, or duplicate stitch the edges of the patch to the mitten. Carry sewing yarn to the inside of the mitten and pull out the basting or pins.

3. Turn the mitten inside out and, with the same yarn, stitch the ragged edges of the hole to the back of the patch, so that all lies flat and won’t catch fingers.

4. Finishing: No need to tie knots. Work the sewing yarn into the fabric and trim closely.

Knitted-on patches. You can also make patches right on the garment by picking up stitches below the hole and knitting (back and forth) a square or rectangle large enough to cover the hole. Duplicate stitch the last round in place on the mitten, hand-stitch the sides of the patch down, turn the mitten inside out and darn (running stitch) the worn place to the patch on the inside.

Fixing worn palms. Now we leave the field of knitting and enter leather work. A worn palm can be fixed by sewing lines of running stitches across it, by duplicate stitching (above), patching with either wool fabric or portions of other knitting (above), or you can make an even greater glove or mitten of it by first lightly darning to keep the fabric in place, then cutting a soft leather palm and stitching it in place. Cutting and stitching leather takes perhaps an hour. See Occupational Reinforcements for patterns and the Inuit and Aroostook Mitten for help with leather working.

Other purposes. Double-knit mittens whose tips have dissolved and whose thumbs are toast can still serve you. After decades of saving worn-out mittens, I found a solution.

I had half a dozen dead Fox & Geese mittens and wondered if they would make reasonable potholders. I laundered them with other laundry, and they shrank and thickened even more than they had in use. I cut out the thumb gore and kept going to the tip. There went the sad thumb, its weakened attachment to the palm, and the worn hole by the index finger.

I cut off the worn tip. What was left was perfectly good, fulled, knitted fabric, really thick, almost square. I flattened it out. A practical potholder. Not beautiful, but not bad looking, and really, really practical. You do not burn your fingers through this one. I have six of these now and use them all the time. I could have done something nice to the edges — bind them? sew two layers together? — but I didn’t.