3 days ago | Advertorial | Helen Ashcroft

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

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

Llanidloes, late October. The first snow of the year is lying on the hills above the River Severn, and out in the yard Emrys Pugh is doing what he has done every winter morning for thirty years. He stands perfectly still by the bird table with one hand held out, palm up, full of mealworms. After a minute, a robin drops out of the hawthorn hedge and lands on his fingers.

Inside, at the kitchen table, his wife Eirlys 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 Moss sitting right here on the windowsill, watching the both of them.”

Eirlys 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 robin? My hands won’t let me anymore.”

Sixteen winters of a cat at the window

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

In 2011, Emrys’s old work gloves finally fell apart, and he refused to feed the birds bare-handed in January. So Eirlys 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 Moss onto the palm of the left glove, sitting with her head turned up, and a tiny robin near the tip of the middle finger on the right.

“The first morning he wore them, he cupped his hands for the mealworms and stopped,” Eirlys says. “He came back inside and held them up to show me. When you put your hands together, Moss is looking right up at the robin. He said, ‘There. 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 robin on the other. Put your hands together, palms up, and the picture snaps into place: the cat is watching the robin. People do it without thinking. Eirlys 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 chapel, then the woman who runs the bakery on Great Oak Street. Eirlys 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 community centre and sold out before lunch.

After that, it never really stopped. For fifteen winters, Eirlys has knitted about five pairs a week, every week, on her four double-pointed needles by the Rayburn. 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 Machynlleth has a pair in every colour,” Eirlys says. “She says she matches them to her coats.”

One pair, one evening

Each pair starts as a plain ball of soft, fine yarn. Eirlys knits the cuff first, a long ribbed one that sits snug under a coat sleeve so no cold 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. Moss 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 robin is smaller than a fingernail and, Eirlys 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 red kite for her son-in-law, a curlew 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 robin.”

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 Eirlys’s gloves different

• Knitted and stitched by one pair of hands: every glove is knitted on needles and every cat and robin is embroidered by Eirlys herself, at her kitchen table.
• A picture that completes itself: put your hands together and the cat looks up at the robin. 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: Eirlys 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, Eirlys 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 blanket chest in the spare room, wrapped in tissue paper, sorted by colour.

Eirlys always sold her gloves for £50 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 Nia, 22, set up the online orders. “Nan doesn’t do computers,” Nia 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 Eirlys’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,” Nia says. “They don’t say anything. They just put their hands together.”

Nia 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.”

Eirlys 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 Moss and the robin in purple crayon. Eirlys keeps them all.

What customers say

Where can you get Eirlys’s gloves?

Eirlys’s gloves are only available through Cedar and Tin, a small online shop for real handwork from makers like her. Nia runs Eirlys’s corner of the shop, and every order is posted from Llanidloes.

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,” Eirlys says.

The verdict

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

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