When Vermonter Jen Ellis woke on Inauguration Day 2021 to a blizzard of interest in the mittens she’d made for U.S. Sen. 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?
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.
The full story, Ellis knew, was much less warm and fuzzy.
“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. “I was that kid who accepted ice cream cups and attention from a man I thought I could trust.”
Ellis was a grade-schooler when she was sexually abused. Trying to numb the shame with food, she gained weight and lost her sense of self-worth. Then she walked into a home economics classroom full of sewing machines.
“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. “Nothing else in my life was that measured or controlled. It was my first glimpse of a new kind of freedom.”
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.
“When everything else is falling apart,” she says, “sewing is how I put it back together.”
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.
“To be clear, this is about more than the mittens,” singer-songwriter Dar Williams notes in the foreword, which comes alongside words from Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt. “She presents us with a recognizable terrain of breakdowns, breakthroughs, and broken American systems.”
‘The skills I needed to save myself’
Ellis — who has family roots in Windham County and a home in Essex Junction — starts her 268-page book with her childhood in South Portland, Maine. There, a seeming sentinel of an elderly neighbor watched from a lawn chair as schoolchildren walked home. One day, he invited her to sit on his lap.
“When I think back on it now, I can imagine why he must have considered me to be an easy target,” writes Ellis, whose single mother worked full-time. “When you are 9 and powerless, there are no words to describe sexual abuse. I didn’t know how to tell him to stop, and I was too ashamed to ask for help.”
Running home in tears, Ellis stuffed down her emotions for a year. Then something changed upon the start of sixth-grade home economics.
“When I was sewing in Mrs. Collett’s class, my mind was focused and I was happy,” she writes. “It was in her class that I started to develop the skills I needed to save myself.”
Ellis kept sewing right up to enrolling at the University of Vermont. Today, the Green Mountain State is known as the first in the nation to adopt same-sex civil unions, in 2000, and full marriage rights by a legislative vote, in 2009. But when Ellis arrived in 1996, what’s now history had yet to happen.
“Throughout my entire childhood, the deep shadow of the AIDS crisis lurked in every conversation about homosexuality and instilled fear and heightened homophobia in our already intolerant culture,” she writes. “I viewed my growing love for other women as something that needed to be straightened out, both figuratively and literally.”
Ellis found a UVM staffer who offered support before the internet allowed confidential searches. Returning home for the summer, she eyed her bedroom closet full of prom dresses and stuffed animals.
“I was caught between wanting a new, fresh start, and holding on to my past.”
Ellis gave away most of her childhood mementos. But underneath them all, she found and kept one forgotten anchor: Her sewing machine.
Ellis stitched together quilts as she went on to graduate, launch a teaching career, meet and marry a fellow UVM alumna and enlist “a friend of a friend” to donate sperm in hopes of having a child. She tried a half-dozen times before getting pregnant, only to lose the baby in the first trimester — just after a doctor questioned her family makeup.
“This was none of his business,” she writes. “He had only succeeded in teaching us that one way to make a miscarriage worse is to throw in some homophobia.”
Devastated, Ellis again turned to needle and thread.
“Creativity is a healing force that is often overlooked in modern society,” she writes. “Creativity releases dopamine and serotonin; it makes you happy. Making mittens was literally saving me from my sadness.”
‘I think someone is trying to reach you’
Ellis tried seemingly every fertility treatment for two years before giving birth to a daughter in 2015.
“The profundity of it for me, though I am not a religious person, was that this literally was an immaculate conception,” she writes.
Ellis went on to give Sanders his mittens, then to witness the Donald Trump presidency, Covid-19 pandemic, and, on Jan. 20, 2021, the swearing-in of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Teaching online at Westford Elementary School, Ellis ignored her cellphone on Inauguration Day as it dinged with text message upon text message.
“I think someone is trying to reach you,” one of her second-graders said.
The school librarian had news: Sanders was on television wearing her mittens.
Ellis smiled — and silenced her phone. Moving on to watch the ceremony with her wife and daughter, she soon faced more texts. Then memes. Then media calls. Then emails — 4,000 before bed, 8,000 upon waking up, 10,000 by the time she went to sleep again.
“The sensitive part of my heart was overjoyed that people I didn’t even know liked me,” she writes. “It felt like I was being given a big thumbs up in a world that sometimes leads with a different finger.”
But Ellis felt a growing grip of anxiety. Report cards were due that week. Scammers were impersonating her on the internet. And websites she hadn’t talked to nonetheless were revealing her private life. One outed her with the headline, “Meet the Queer Schoolteacher Who Made Bernie’s Inauguration Mittens.”
“Truthfully, there is still a little piece of me that is protective of that part of my identity,” she writes. “Anyone who has ever had to hide their sexual orientation in order to stay employed understands the deep-rooted fear that comes with being outed. Even though I could no longer be fired for being gay and my marriage was now legal in all 50 states, fear of homophobia is a trauma that lingers.”
Enter Sanders, who called to ask how she was holding up.
“My best advice to you,” she recalls him saying, “is don’t look online and don’t read everything people write.”
Overwhelmed, Ellis decided to seize the narrative. She made several pairs of mittens to raise funds for local groups such as the Outright Vermont LGBTQ+ youth support organization, then signed a charitable partnership with the Vermont Teddy Bear Company to produce them for the masses.
“I was beginning to realize that this media frenzy could be used to do something powerful,” she recalls. “All the reporters wanted a good story, so I decided to give them a story worth writing about.”
Ellis is set to promote her book Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Burlington’s Phoenix Books, May 12 at 7 p.m. at Everyone’s Books in Brattleboro, and June 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Shelburne’s Pearson Library. She’ll then come full circle with an August reading in Maine.
“I arrived in Mrs. Collett’s sixth-grade classroom searching for something, and she helped me to find it,” she writes. “I threaded my first sewing machine and have been stitching the pieces of my life together ever since.”
Ellis ends her memoir by tying together past and future, noting her late grandmother is the namesake of her school-age daughter, Helen.
“I think about the many ways that creativity has brought healing and peace to my life,” she writes. “Tomorrow I will sit down with Helen to create something that didn’t exist today. Together we will push and pull the yarn, and that is where a new story will begin.”