3 days ago | Advertorial | Laura Delorey

“Put your hands together and the cat finds the bird.” Why a 74-year-old Cape Breton grandmother is selling her last cat & bird gloves at a special price

For fifteen winters, Bernadine MacIsaac has knitted every pair of her gloves by hand and stitched a little black cat into one palm and a tiny bird onto the other. Arthritis is making her stop. The last 103 pairs are going out now, for half of what she always charged.

Mabou, late October. The first snow of the year is dusting the hills above the harbour, and out in the yard Lauchie MacIsaac is doing what he has done every winter morning for thirty years. He stands perfectly still by the feeder with one hand held out, palm up, full of sunflower seeds. After a minute, a chickadee drops out of the spruce and lands on his fingers.

Inside, at the kitchen table, his wife Bernadine watches through the window with her knitting in her lap. “That’s where it all started,” she says. “Him, that bird, and our old cat Tansy sitting right here on the windowsill, watching the both of them.”

Bernadine is 74. Her needles are on the table. A basket of yarn sits on the chair beside her. Since last winter, her fingers have been swelling up at night, and the arthritis has reached the knuckles she needs most. “I can still do a row or two,” she says, turning her hands over. “But the stitching? The little bird? My hands won’t let me anymore.”

Sixteen winters of a cat at the window

Tansy was a black stray who walked into the MacIsaacs’ woodshed in the winter of 2000 and never left. Every morning, when Lauchie went out with the seed, Tansy took up her post on the kitchen windowsill. She would sit there for an hour, tail curled around her paws, eyes fixed on the chickadees landing in Lauchie’s hand. “Sixteen winters she watched those birds,” Bernadine laughs. “She never caught a single one. I don’t think she wanted to. She just liked looking.”

In 2011, Lauchie’s old fishing gloves finally fell apart, and he refused to feed the birds bare-handed in January. So Bernadine knitted him a pair. Soft, fine yarn, five fingers, a long cuff that tucked under his coat sleeve. And because she was in a playful mood, she stitched Tansy onto the palm of the left glove, sitting with her head turned up, and a tiny chickadee near the tip of the middle finger on the right.

“The first morning he wore them, he cupped his hands for the seed and stopped,” Bernadine says. “He came back inside and held them up to show me. When you put your hands together, Tansy is looking right up at the bird. He said, ‘Now she’s finally got one.’”

The trick everybody wants to see

Hold the gloves apart and you see a little cat on one hand and a little bird on the other. Put your hands together, palms up, and the picture snaps into place: the cat is watching the bird. People do it without thinking. Bernadine has seen it a thousand times. “They open their hands, they look, and then they smile,” she says. “Every single one.”

That first winter, the neighbours noticed. Then the ladies from church, then the woman who runs the bakery down the road. Bernadine knitted pairs in the evenings and gave most of them away. By the second winter, people were asking to pay. She took a table at the Christmas craft fair in the parish hall and sold out before lunch.

After that, it never really stopped. For fifteen winters, Bernadine has knitted about five pairs a week, every week, on her four double-pointed needles by the wood stove. That adds up to roughly 3,900 pairs, all from the same chair, all from the same pair of hands. Some of her first customers have bought a new pair every few years. “One lady from Port Hood has a pair in every colour,” Bernadine says. “She says she matches them to her coats.”

One pair, one evening

Each pair starts as a plain ball of soft, fine yarn. Bernadine knits the cuff first, a long ribbed one that sits snug under a coat sleeve so no snow gets in. Then the hand, then every finger, one by one. “The thumb is the fiddly part,” she says. “Everybody thinks it’s the fingers. It’s the thumb.”

The embroidery comes last. Tansy takes about forty-five minutes: hundreds of small, tight stitches laid side by side, so the cat looks smooth and dark against the knit. The bird is smaller than a fingernail and, Bernadine says, the hardest part of the whole glove. “If the beak is off by one stitch, the cat is looking at nothing. Then I pull it out and start again.”

She has tried other animals over the years. A fox for a neighbour, a puffin for her son-in-law, a loon for the lady at the library. “They were fine,” she says with a shrug. “But nobody ever came back for the fox. Everybody comes back for the cat and the bird.”

That is the part her hands can no longer do. Knitting is rhythm. Embroidery is precision. And precision is the first thing arthritis takes away.

What makes Bernadine’s gloves different

• Knitted and stitched by one pair of hands: every glove is knitted on needles and every cat and bird is embroidered by Bernadine herself, at her kitchen table.
• A picture that completes itself: put your hands together and the cat looks up at the bird. It never gets old.
• A long ribbed cuff: it stays tucked under your coat sleeve, so no cold gets in at the wrist.
• Soft, stretchy, one size: about 22 cm long and 12.5 cm across the palm. It fits most women’s hands comfortably.
• Ready to give: Bernadine folds every pair in tissue paper herself before it goes in the box, so it arrives looking like a present, because it usually is one.
• Four colours: Oatmeal, Dusty Rose and Slate Grey with a black cat, and Midnight Black with a silver-grey cat.

Why these are the last 103

Last winter, Bernadine noticed she was dropping stitches. By spring, her knuckles were swollen most mornings, and her doctor told her plainly that the fine work had to stop. “He said I could keep knitting a little for fun,” she says. “But five pairs a week, and all that stitching? No.”

So she made a decision. Through the summer, she finished every ball of yarn she had left, a few rows at a time, with long breaks in between. When she was done, there were 103 pairs. They are stacked in an old cedar chest in the spare room, wrapped in tissue paper, sorted by colour.

Bernadine always sold her gloves for CA$78 a pair at the craft fair. For this last batch, she has cut the price in half. “I don’t want them sitting in a chest,” she says. “I want them on somebody’s hands this winter. Somebody who’ll put them together and smile.”

Her granddaughter Shayla, 22, set up the online orders. “Grandma doesn’t do computers,” Shayla says. “She does knitting. So I take the orders, and she still insists on folding every pair herself before it goes in the box.”

The present that makes people hold out their hands

Most of Bernadine’s gloves were never bought for the person who wears them. Daughters buy them for mothers. Sisters buy them for sisters. Cat people buy them for other cat people. “And I’ll tell you what happens when they open the box,” Shayla says. “They don’t say anything. They just put their hands together.”

Shayla has noticed something else. People rarely order just one pair. “They buy one for themselves first,” she says. “Then they come back two weeks later and order three more, because everybody who saw them wanted a pair too.”

Bernadine still has a shoebox full of thank-you cards. One is from a woman whose mother keeps her pair on the kitchen windowsill all summer, “so the cat has something to look at.” Another is from a little girl who drew Tansy and the bird in purple crayon. Bernadine keeps them all.

What customers say

Where can you get Bernadine’s gloves?

Bernadine’s gloves are only available through Backroad Goods, a small online shop for real handwork from makers like her. Shayla runs Bernadine’s corner of the shop, and every order ships from Mabou.

Look-alike cat gloves have started to turn up on the big discount sites. They are printed, not stitched, the knit is thin, and the bird often sits on the wrong finger. “If you can’t feel the stitches with your thumb, it isn’t one of mine,” Bernadine says.

The verdict

Bernadine’s Cat & Bird Gloves are warm, soft winter gloves with a small secret: a cat in one hand, a bird in the other, and a little moment of joy every time you put your hands together. Knitted and stitched by one woman on Cape Breton Island, and after these 103 pairs, there will not be any more.

“I had fifteen good winters with these,” Bernadine says, and folds her hands in her lap. “Now I’d like them to keep somebody else warm.” Thank you, Bernadine.