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]

Sometimes when I’m scrolling through Ravelry a pattern will catch my eye as much because of the name as the look of the design (which is a little hard to see in those little thumbnails sometimes, anyway).

So it was with the Stellify shawl by Paola Albergamo. Stellify means to turn into a star, and the name and the story behind the shawl come from the story of Ariadne. The better known part of her story is that she helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur, but he then abandoned her. What comes after in many stories is that Dionysus found her, fell in love with her and later married her.

When he threw her jeweled crown into the sky, the Corona Borealis constellation was formed.

What does all this have to do with shawl knitting?

The shawl itself looks like it has a scattering of stars on it, as if it, too, has been stellified. The shawl begins with an I-cord tap and is shaped into a triangular shawl with both lateral and central increases. I-cord edging is incorporated into the sides, and the colorwork is done with mosaic knitting, which means this shawl is easier than it looks.

Mosaic knitting has you working with just one color per row, slipping stitches that appear in the other color to make the colorwork visible. Even better for people new to this kind of colorwork, the pattern includes written and charted instructions throughout so it should be easy to follow along.

The pattern comes in two sizes (the larger one is shown here) and calls for two colors of fingering weight yarn. It looks great in black and yellow, but don’t miss the other projects on Ravelry to see other fun and beautiful color options.

You can find the pattern in English and Italian on Ravelry.

[Photo: Paola Albergamo]

Have you read?