Was It Worth It

July 30, 2025

May 2018 - I took apart a fast-fashion sweater so that I could knit a different one with the yarn.
July 2019 - I started knitting the sweater.
February 2021 - I took the sweater apart and redrafted the pattern because the yoke wasn’t fitting right.
October 2023 - I took the sweater apart again because I didn’t have enough yarn to finish it. I redrafted the pattern at a looser gauge in order to use less yarn.
July 2025 - I finally finished the damn thing. The photographic evidence is shown above. I think after seven years, proof is required.

The photo below is how it looked when I pulled it out of the clothes pile that my girls were donating to Good Will. I hated that sweater but the yarn felt nice. I must have been temporarily star-struck by the alpaca content because I somehow glossed over the polyamide and acrylic content. The one good thing about it is that it’s machine washable.

I started by unravelling the sweater, skeining the yarn, washing it and then balling it up. It sure looked like a lot of yarn but by October 2023 I knew better.

I saw a beautiful version of Junko Okamoto’s Bright Sweater and thought, yes this is the pattern for me. So I bought the Bright pattern thinking I would be able to use quite a bit of the information to make the version in my head. That turned out to be false and now when I look at the pictures of the original it seems obvious that it was going to be a crazy, massive, time sucking, hair pulling, metric tonne of work. In my innocence, I knit up a swatch and got started.

I have a few progress shots from working on it for so long. (Left) Here it is in its infancy. This was August 2019 when Reese was a baby shark and she ate my knitting needle. (Right) Here it is in February 2021 right before I took it apart for the first time.

And another one from 2023 when I was finally on track and doing some knitting over the holidays.

These are from 2025. In its finished state. It fits. I’m done. And now I can finally knit something else.

So the real question is was it worth it? Honestly, that’s really hard to answer. Do I love the sweater? Yes. I absolutely love it. Would I do it again? Maybe. For one, I would take apart a sweater made of better yarn. That’s a heck of a lot of work for something that is 70% plastic. Second, I would probably pick a pattern that I liked just as it is rather than one I like but I wish it had (fill in the blank). Third, who am I kidding. This sort of escapade will probably happen again but maybe I can whittle the drama down to six years instead of seven.