That summer when Paul got sick was the worst summer of our lives. We lost our wharf, our trap, our punt and our motorboat. We had some hard times in our lives and we also had a lot of good times. We always had food on the table and we always managed to get by. Today me and Paul are retired and all of our children are grown up with children of their own. Today we look back with happiness and sadness. Happiness at the good times we had and sadness that those times are gone now.

I've always done knitting and always done crafts. I've knit different kinds of mitts. One kind was very nice and very simple to knit. It is just plain knitting but you have ends of raw home spun wool and you knit two stitches and then with the third stitch you put on this end of raw wool. Your ends of wool are about an inch long so when your mitt is done it is all wool inside just like sheep skin.

Norwegian Mitts (Inside) Photo courtesy of Bonnie Rumbolt

You do not darn the wool, it just stays the way it is. I only ever saw one pair knit and it was when my father had rheumatic fever. After he got well my mother went and knit him those mitts because he could not keep his hands warm. That is the way they were done with those ends of raw sheep wool. My mother said she was going to knit a pair of 'drummed mitts', I don't know where the word 'drummed' came from. That is all she used to say, she was going to 'drum' the mitts. Where she got the name or the pattern from, I wouldn't know. Another name for the mitts was Norwegian mitts. I guess you could knit socks as well as mitts. Like I said, my mother knit them because Dad had this bad hand and he couldn't get warm. You didn't knit them like that everyday. That was something special.

Norwegian Mitts (Outside) Photo courtesy of Bonnie Rumbolt

I used to spin my own wool. The old fashioned way of spinning wool was with two cards. You carded it up and rolled it up and then you put it in the spin wheel and spun it. If you saw all of the wool I spun, you'd have plenty to knit socks. I always knit for my own family. We used to knit and get paid for knitting. You had to do all these kinds of things. I was only a house wife but I had to provide clothes for my children because we didn't have Eaton's catalogues. We couldn't send there and have something come in. You had to do the best you could with what you had. I also used to make clothes. The material we'd get from different places, then we'd sew clothes for the children from it. My father made seal skin boots when we were children. That is all we wore. I never had anything to do with that. He used to dry the skins, cut it out and make the boots.