Many little boys living in Kansas in the 1920s and 1930s kept their hands warm with handknitted mittens or gloves or made do with hand-me-down adult gloves or the tops of worn-out socks, but Richard Barton Francis’s mother dressed him in store-bought mittens (see the preceding article and the photograph above center). The coarse yarn used in these utilitarian accessories, however, practically guaranteed that the finished productwould be scratchy

Although the basic design for mittens hasn’t changed, it’s possible today to choose fi bers that are far more comfortable and frequently far warmer than those used in the early twentieth century. I handspun a commercially dyed alpaca/wool roving to make the yarn for the sample mittens. A commercially available yarn is listed in the Materialsbox.