New York, we caught a break. Winter Storm Rex, originally slated to dose us with yet more snow, has passed to the north (sorry, Boston!) and temperatures are expected to climb to a paradisiacal 50 degrees by Friday. But don’t pack in your winter clothes: the thermometer’s headed back south again next week. And for those of you kittens careless enough to have lost your finger warmers? Never fear, there’s an app for that, or rather a website. Cold hands, meet ifoundyourmitten.com.
Summer Bedard, a designer at Betaworks and California native, says she was inspired to create the site after spending much of her time in New York looking down, “usually with my head buried in a scarf or jacket to stay warm.” She couldn’t help but notice that, in winter time, the NYC pavement is one big, giant graveyard for orphaned and shivering gloves and mittens. The pathos of the single mitten moved her: “It’s only good in a pair. When you see one you think of someone walking around with one cold hand. Or at least I do.”
Ifoundyourmitten.com is her way of bringing mittens and hands back together again. By tagging their Instagram uploads with #ifoundyourmitten, users from New York and beyond have helpfully located nearly a thousand mittens since September of 2012. Summer then gives the lonely Insta-mittens a happy new home on the redesigned website, which not only allows visitors to see their mitten’s resting place on a map, but also features a slideshow, partnering bereft mittens closeups with a Google Earth scene of the mitten sighting.
The #ifoundyourmitten tag has accumulated a healthy number of followers–enough to constitute the first ifoundyourmitten holiday party this past December. Among the invitees were Aaron Harmon (@aharmon on Twitter), the Saint Bernard’s dog of mitten finders this winter, and Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey), last year’s mitten hunting champ. Who wasn’t invited? Those snarky individuals who thought they were pointing something important out when they remarked that most of the photos on the site are, in fact, of gloves. No doubt these are the same people who tell their friends at the bar, “Uhoh, it’s one a.m. I better go because I have to get to work early TODAY.” Whatever.
