Why Storebought Sweaters are Terrible

I enjoyed reading this article from The Atlantic about why storebought sweaters are so awful, mostly because as a knitter, I know what to do about it.

The author, Amanda Mull, was prompted to look into the knitwear industry thanks to a tweet (do we call it an X now? I don’t know) calling for a “national conversation” on the decline in knitwear quality over the past 20 years. The post was about a sweater Billy Crystal wore in When Harry Met Sally and the terrible (though expensive) counterpart Ben Schwartz wore to re-create the look.

Update: Ironically one of the projects in the Knitty surprise for deep fall 2023 was an Aran knit sweater, When Harry Met Lucy by Paul Haesemeyer, inspired in part by that very sweater.

There’s a lot of reasons knits are awful these days, Mull discovered, including fast fashion, how cheap acrylic fiber is and how much fashion companies both high and low end love profit.

The vast majority of sweaters produced today, even those that may be marketed as wool or cashmere, have some kind of acrylic or nylon (read: plastic) content, and actually a lot of yarn does, too. Of course you can find pure wool and other natural fibers, but a lot of times acrylic is added to the mix to make yarn machine washable.

That’s another factor in people not purchasing wool sweaters even if they could find them: people who aren’t yarn crafters typically aren’t doing a lot of laundry by hand.

The good news is we have the tools at our disposal to make our own wonderful sweaters, and to choose to make them with natural fibers if we want. Fast fashion is easy but those sweaters don’t feel good and they don’t last. So much better to make your own and care for it so you will continue to enjoy it for many, many years. And even if you’ve never knit a sweater before, you probably have all the skills you need to do it. (And it’s a great thing to learn for winter if you’re in the part of the world heading into that season.)

Have sweater knitting questions? Drop them in the comments and I’ll do the best I can to answer them!

[Photo via Film Updates on X]

Next Pattern:

I don’t even know what to say about this amazing knitting pattern. The Bestiary Scarf from Monstra & Mirabilia is so full of details it’s a little intimidating to talk about.

It features, as the designer describes it, an “artistic encyclopaedia of Western mythical creatures.”

The pattern includes a dragon, harpy, Medusa, chimaera, centauress, phoneix, kraken, mermaid, sew serpent, cyclops, wyvern, Pegasus, amphiptere and amphibaena. (It’s a good thing there’s a photo of the proejct with everything labelled because I definitely didn’t know the names for everything.) It’s also designed like a landscape, with water and land creatures toward the bottom ends and sky creatures toward the top.

The dragon is at the center and is worked sideways so it will show as upright when you wear it.

The scarf is worked in double knitting, so the colorwork appears in the opposite colors on the other side.

It’s worked in light fingering weight yarn (on size 0 US or 2mm knitting needles) and the colorwork is shown in charts. The pattern also includes some video tutorials and written instructions to help you along. The designer says the pattern is for intermediate knitters, and “advanced beginners may succeed with patience and the help of the video tutorials.”

When I was an advanced beginner this kind of a pattern would have brought me to tears, but if you love a challenge, and a project that you’ll wear and get tons of astonished reactions every time, this is the project for you. And of course if you have a few double knitting projects under your belt and are comfortable reading charts, this project shouldn’t be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. But lots of great things take time, and that’s never stopped us before, right?

You can get a copy of this pattern from Monstra & Mirabilia on Ravelry.

[Photo: Monstra & Mirabilia ]

Next Pattern:

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