'Mitten lady' has warm hands and a warm heart

Meet the mitten lady.

Pam Lewis grew up one of seven children in a Michigan household. During her first marriage, her husband often was out of work. She hasn't forgotten what it's like to be cold, to have cold children, to have no money.

Today she's a mother -- she and her husband, James, have eight children in their blended family, ages 13 to 27, five grandchildren and one more grandchild on the way. Pam handles purchasing for Horlick High, but in her off-hours she's a seamstress and crafter. She designs and makes items she sells to raise money for her family's Christmas presents.

And to help others.

Her mitten mission began two years ago, as she drove home after looking for wool at a thrift store. "I saw a mom, her two kids and baby walking down Martin Luther King Drive. It was very cold out. They had no mittens on their hands and looked like they were freezing.

"So I pulled up by them and told the mom I make really warm mittens and asked her if she would like some for herself and her children. She said yes, and I handed them all mittens. She said thank you and walked away, and I was so glad I could help."

And so began Pam's mitten mission.

Actually, let's back up a bit, to Pam's first mittens. Her mother showed her some mittens and said, "Oh, Pammy, you're going to have to make these." But -- as daughters often do when mothers make suggestions -- she didn't. Then, months later, one of Pam's co-workers at school brought in a pair of mittens she had bought. "I realized right away, those were the mittens my mother told me about.


"Well, I look at something, and I can make it," Pam says. She went home that day and on her lunch hour cut out a cardboard pattern -- she still uses it -- and made her first mitten. Wool on the outside, polar fleece on the inside.

The same as the mittens her mother had told her about, although after two years of mitten-making she's still trying to make them better. (The wool is boiled to make it tight and firm.) Pam makes mittens for adults, children, infants; uses buttons or other decorations. She and I go down into her basement craft room -- occupied by three sewing machines, a cutting table, piles of sweater remnants and a new litter of kittens -- and she pulls out one of those big plastic tote boxes, the kind you store winter clothes in over the summer.

Out pours a kaleidoscope of mittens in every imaginable color. Light, dark, striped; Green and Gold for Packers fans, Maroon for the Badgers; you name it. Even some with white fur cuffs, "for classy ladies," she says.

Pam makes a few hundred pairs of mittens each season; also dolls, bag holders, muffs, hats and so on, and sells most of them -- some have gone as far as Alaska, and Australia.

But she also makes dozens of pairs of mittens for others, taking joy in the giving: to workers in need, to teachers for needy kids, to mothers with cold kids. "I still remember when I was really poor and couldn't buy anything," she says, her voice trailing off.

So on Christmas eve, one of Pam's daughters will take a large box full of mittens -- more than 50 pairs of them -- down to the HALO homeless shelter. "My daughter still gets all emotional," she says. "It all makes my heart warm."

Ours, too.

And if you've got some old wool sweaters you've outgrown, Pam would love to recycle them into mittens for HALO. You can e-mail her HERE.