On Dec 15, 2004, at 16:31, Ruth Budge wrote:
as a young child, I *hated* having a string!!!!
The string on my mittens rated "hateful", right up there with the mittens themselves; if you're used to having 4 fingers and a thumb (or, 5 fingers, if one thinks in Polish), suddenly having only 1 finger take place of the 4 is *strtictly no fun* in moblity stakes. Only the skirts, tights (thick cotton or wool) and underpants, as well as all kinds of tops (beginning with the undershirt and ending with the outer jacket) *all* being waist-oriented (pinching the waist, but leaving the midriff bare all the same, somehow) made wintertime more miserable than those strung-up mittens...
I even liked my muff better... It, too, was on a string, but the string went outside the coat, not inside it. And it went with a long - to my calves - coat; no mention of waist, no bare midriff in freezing weather... :) Unfortunately, both were considered strictly "Sunday morning in the park" wear, so, 6 days of the week I suffered.
I didn't keep my hands warm (or not much) in either the muff or the mittens; getting them half-frozen (then having snow rubbed on them to restore circulation) was far preferable to being immobilised. But I never chewed through the string of my muff; a tactic that I resorted to, on a regular basis, with the mittens... I use to be able to lose a mitten a week sometimes which, in Poland of shortages, was a major disaster.
And then my Mother got inspired, and sewed the string to the back of my jacket along the shoulder seam - sleeve to sleeve - and I got resigned. Mittens as such remained anathema but, at least, the string no longer rubbed my neck raw, and it tangled less...
I'm eaten with envy nowadays, when I see *gloves* being available for tots; I must have been 13 or 14 before I got my first pair (though I stopped wearing the string around 8)...
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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