Rockland knitter weaves 70-year legacy of yarn

Phyllis Winslow, 76, of Rockland has been knitting for 70 years. Her mother taught her when she was a child growing up on North Haven.

“I’ve knit every day of my life,” she said – so much that her patterns for socks, mittens, caps and sweaters are “in her head.” She doesn’t need to resort to patterns and printed directions – except maybe when knitting socks for family members. Her directions, with the name of the person the socks fit, are jotted down in a set of five numbers: how many stitches to cast on, how many rows of ribbing for the leg, how many stitches for the heel, how many rows for the foot and how many for the toe. Thus, her sock directions might read 44, 33, 20 and so on.

The mother of three, she taught each of her children to knit.

“Knitting,” she said, “is practical stuff. I said they might as well learn, just like I taught them how to cook and take care of themselves.”

One of her favorite knitting projects is knitting caps for every infant born at Pen Bay hospital.

“I make the caps to look like strawberries, lemons, pumpkins and blueberries. No one had ever done it before. Leave it to me to start something,” she said. To date she has knit and donated 427 baby caps to the hospital. “They call me ‘the hat lady.’ ”

Winslow spent her married life on Vinalhaven, where she kept books at the store of her husband, Colon Winslow. Later on, she and her husband lived in Las Vegas to be near their son, who was in the Air Force and stationed there.

“We went for a visit and stayed 13 years,” she said.

Last year, Winslow knit 20 pairs of socks – she has three children, seven grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

“Once,” she said, “my grandson went to the doctor’s and he had to take his boots off. He was wearing socks I knit him. The doctor started to laugh and said, ‘Your socks don’t match.’ And my grandson said, ‘They don’t have to match, they’re Nana socks’ – that’s what they all call my socks, Nana socks.”

She knits socks out of leftover yarn and makes no attempt to make a pair match.

After all those years of knitting, Winslow has a few tricks in her knitting bag. She knits dental floss into the heels and toes of her socks to make them wear longer. When she knits mittens for children, she knits a buttonhole into each cuff. Then a button is sewn onto the child’s jacket and the mittens are buttoned onto the jacket so the mittens never get lost. And once, when her children’s hand- knit sweaters had worn out or were outgrown, she raveled them out and used the yarn to knit strips, which she then braided into a rug.

A while back, she said, her family gave her a computer.

“I said I’d never learn to run that thing. On the island, I never learned to type because they [the schools] didn’t teach it. But now I type and I visit chat rooms.”

Winslow said that recently she told her 12-year-old granddaughter, Brooke, that it was time for her to learn to knit because someone was going to have to take her place when Winslow got to the point she couldn’t knit anymore.

“She was eager,” Winslow said, “but wanted to start knitting socks on double-point needles right off the bat, and that was a little to hard to start with. It’s better to start with something easy, like a scarf.”

In addition to her knitting, Winslow volunteers at a local nursing home, where she feeds patients who can’t feed themselves and reads and talks to them.

“I try to stay out of trouble,” she said.

Snippets

The Castine Arts Association will hold a Fiber Day from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Feb. 7, at Emerson Hall in Castine. Fiber artists will give demonstrations of felting, knitting, spinning, quilting, crewel embroidery, floor cloth making, needlepoint, weaving, rug hooking and fabric dying. Participating fiber artists include Lyn Mayewski, Margery Read, Deborah Pulliam, Sylvia Muszala, Carolyn Ulrich, Vickie Sheridan, Pat Rock, Chris Leith, Judy Wylie and Charleen Wiseman. The event is free and open to the public. To learn more about the association, its slide lectures and August craft sale, call 326-8020 or e-mail mlfr@prexar.com.

Ardeana Hamlin welcomes comments, suggestions and ideas. Call her at 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.