I’m presently in the middle of knitting a sweater that I knit and designed years and years ago, with only minor modifications, and I have a number of projects that I’m thinking about that involve “reknitting” past projects. While I don’t think that I’ve peaked, or am out of ideas for knitting, it’s very clear to me that novelty isn’t exactly my guiding principle as a knitter: I enjoy the process and the act above all else, and the pleasure of wearing handknits is (for me) mostly about custom fit and less about novelty or fashion, exactly.

The chance to re-knit things, removes a lot of the questions of a design from the process and not only fix mistakes, but also polish and iterate on a garment with less guess work. It’s also the case that these projects often feel like returning to an old friend, which is incredibly comforting. Some of these projects, on my backlog include:

  • This basic two-color sweaters (colorblock, I suppose,) that I’m presently knitting and have/will knit again where the lower part of the body is in black--or similar very dark--except for the top 3-4 inches of the body in a contrasting color, matched by the sleeves and the collar, which I try and push into the black section.
  • Alice Starmore’s Faroe Sweater, from Fishermen’s Sweaters, but scaled to actually fit and maybe with a more fitted shoulder. I’ve also, apparently knit a very heavy weight version of the Norway sweater that I never wore, and they’re such great classic designs that are very fun to knit that knitting them again to modernize them sounds like a fun project.
  • A round pi shawl in a dark color, with no lace work (including using raised bar increases rather than yarn overs), and a contrasing set of stripes along the outer edge. There’s this stripe pattern that I think of as “Calvin Klein” stripes, but I don’t kno what the origin of that association is, the basic plan is three stripes, two wide stripes in the contrasting color, and a thin stripe of the original color in between, with the wide stripes being 3 times the width of the interior stripe.
  • I’ve knit two sweaters from Joyce Willams' Latvian Dreams book, the sweater on the cover and one that I knit from several charts, using yarn that ended up pilling a lot. They were delightful to knit: the patterns were originally weaving charts rather than knitting patterns, and thus had a 4-way radial summary symmetry that was just fun to knit. I’d like to try some of these again with better yarn and perhaps use this as a space to explore color work again, but in ways that might be more subtle and also well suited to cardigans and the like.
  • I’ve knit a handful of sweaters with all-over mitten or stocking patterns from various extant knitting traditions, mostly Scandinavian and Turkish, and I think it would be fun to revisit these patterns.