lining a mitten with fleece

One of the most satisfying things about knitting, to me, is that my children love to wear the things I knit for them.

I made my daughter this pair of mittens a year and a half ago, and she's worn them a lot. Several times a week, during the fall, winter and spring.

Last winter she asked me to line them with fleece. I went to the store, bought the fleece, and the fleece has sat, unused, in my closet since then. Lately she's been asking me again to line them with fleece. It's been in the teens here so her hands get cold quickly. And when she plays in the snow, her mittens get wet quickly too. I finally decided yesterday morning to just do it.

It was a lot easier than I thought.

I traced her mitten onto a piece of paper and cut that out to use as my template.

I pinned the paper mitten onto fleece that had been doubled up, and then I cut the fabric.

Using my sewing machine, I sewed the two pieces of fleece together (wrong sides facing each other), with about a 1/4 inch seam allowance, maybe a bit less.

I then tucked the fleece mitten into the knitted one and, using a coordinating thread, hand sewed the cuff of the fleece mitten into the cuff of the knitted mitten. The white arrows indicate where I sewed the fleece onto the cuff--for the most part, it's pretty hard to see the thread at all.

When she put the mitten on last night, she said, "Ahhh, it's like having a blanket for my hand."

I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but I'm not an experienced sewer, and part of why it's taken me so long to do this project is that I wanted it to be perfect. (They're not perfect, but I finally just decided it would be good enough.)

Both of my grandmothers had a lot of experience sewing, and I wish they were still around to offer guidance and advice. But I did inherit my grandmother Rita's sewing things. I even have some of my husband's grandmother's too. Here's a picture of some of the thread I got from them.
I wonder how old some of this is? 15 cents for a wooden spool of thread?

I'm making things for my daughters with things that belonged to their great-grandmothers. And for me, that's why handmade always comes back to nurturing a sense of connection.