Happy Sad Happy

January 28, 2026

The story of this sweater starts out happy but quickly turns sad. My goal is to turn that around and end things back on a happy note. The snag: sad to happy is going to take a lot longer than happy to sad did.

Agatha went on an expedition to Guy’s Frenchys one day and found a lot of gems. In that pile was a beautiful, cream, Irish, cable knit sweater. And it was something she had been wanting for a while. And it was in her size. And it was less than $10. It’s probably her best find to date.

We have a pretty strict policy in this house that thrifted clothes need to be washed before anything else happens. She knows not to wash wool in the washing machine but I think in her excitement over all the good finds, she accidentally threw the sweater in the laundry with everything else.

I will say one thing about 100% virgin Irish wool. It shrinks and felts like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The sweater is so thick and it felted so thoroughly that it can almost stand up on its own. Look at those sleeves! It’s the sweater version of the snowsuit scene from A Christmas Story. She was heartbroken when she opened up the dryer. There were tears. She went from the best sweater find to the worst sweater disaster in the span of one hour.

I love to knit cables but I’ve never knit a classic, cream, all-over pattern like this one. It seemed like a good challenge so I offered to knit her a replacement. I found the Billie Pullover by Sari Nordlund and just changed the cable patterns to match the shrunken sweater.

I knit up a swatch the entire width of the sweater to make sure that my cable swap would work in terms of size but I also wanted to make sure that my pattern charts were working properly.

I’m happy to report that there were only a few tweaks and now things are well on their way. So far, the knitting chapter of this story is hours and hours longer than the shrinking chapter but I’m going to do my best to keep it under seven years.