Knit Three, Purl Two

I don’t remember who taught me to knit mittens. It might have been my maternal grandmother, Marie Lok, or maybe it was my mother who guided me from cast on to cast off, who showed me how to increase every three rows to make the thumb placket, to decrease to form the arch that would curve around the tips of my fingers

While cleaning out the deeper recesses of my clothes closet last summer, I found the pattern for those long-ago two needle mittens, a thirty-one-page instruction booklet—priced at twenty cents—published by the Jack Frost Yarn Company (“First Choice of Millions of Knitters”) in the late 1940s. There are instructions for mittens “for the growing child” as well as directions for a pair of women’s lace gloves that are both “pretty and practical” and intricately patterned pair of Norwegian mittens.

Though the edges of a few pages are tattered, most of the pamphlet is surprisingly intact and still readable.

Some years ago I ditched the two-needle pattern and started knitting four-needle mittens. There’s no seam to sew up at the end; when you’re finished knitting, you’re done, save for some knots to tie and some ends to weave in. Unlike socks, which take a dog’s age and require the eyesight of a fighter pilot, you can knit a pair of mittens in a weekend, over the course of a couple of football games. I’ve knit mittens for each of my sisters and for several of my friends. The pair I’m knitting now (pictured here) are for me, necessitated by the fact that the black mittens I’ve been wearing (knit some years ago) have finally worn out. The thumb sprung a leak during my walk yesterday and the yarn is too fragile, too frayed, to repair.

And so this weekend, I’m knitting mittens. The yarn I’m working with is softer than the scratchy wool I remember from the first pair I ever made. This wool is machine washable, too, and the color is a heathered orange that wasn’t featured in any long-ago spectrum.

 The stitches are the same though, knit and purl, the way my mother taught me. Or my grandmother. For the life of me, I can’t remember.