In that spirit, Ellis has pieced together her patchwork of memories into a raw, revealing memoir, “Bernie’s Mitten Maker,” set for release Tuesday by the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press.Ī meme of U.S. “When everything else is falling apart,” she says, “sewing is how I put it back together.” Given her own machine on her 12th birthday, Ellis turned to it when she struggled with her sexuality in college, wrestled with infertility after meeting her wife, and shoveled out from under an avalanche of memes and media coverage after Sanders wore her mittens. It was my first glimpse of a new kind of freedom.” “Nothing else in my life was that measured or controlled. “What I remember most is the magical moment when I first pressed my foot on the pedal and my scrap of fabric shot forward beneath the needle, emerging from the other side with an even line of stitches,” she recalls. Then she walked into a home economics classroom full of sewing machines.
Trying to numb the shame with food, she gained weight and lost her sense of self-worth. “I was that kid who accepted ice cream cups and attention from a man I thought I could trust.”Įllis was a grade-schooler when she was sexually abused. “When people make jokes about not taking candy from strangers, it isn’t that funny to me,” the 45-year-old begins when putting her thoughts on paper. The full story, Ellis knew, was much less warm and fuzzy. Her short answer: As a friend of Sanders’ daughter-in-law, she passed on the pair as a consolation prize after his unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., reporters from BuzzFeed to the BBC asked the same question: What spurred her to stitch together wool-sweater remnants and recycled-plastic fleece? When Vermonter Jen Ellis woke on Inauguration Day 2021 to a blizzard of interest in the mittens she’d made for U.S.
Vermonter Jen Ellis is author of the new memoir “Bernie’s Mitten Maker.” Photo by Sally McCay
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