There is a certain, um, DIY project which I started work on [winces] in November of 2017.
It’s supposed to be… it’s still going to be a gift for my friend Cathy.
I’m actually very close to finishing it now. I’m on the last piece I need to do before final finishing and assembly.
Danny in the sweater that launched a thousand conspiracy theories.
But it’s not done yet, and that’s why last winter I took a week out to make her a version of the Apollo 11 sweater that Danny wears in The Shining.
I actually got to see the original sweater at the Kubrick exhibit TIFF held a few years ago. Remember that? We used to go to public buildings and see exhibits in person. Up close, it was abundantly clear the sweater had been hand-knitted (well, you could tell that in the film too), but also that it was probably made from a hobby knitter pattern, as opposed to something designed for a garment factory or paid piece work.
Kids modelling the original sweater pattern, and probably breaking today’s safety standards for toys with those helmets.
I went poking around the web for the pattern. There are a lot of imitation/reimagined versions of the sweater out there! But, miracle of miracles, I managed to find someone on Etsy actually selling PDFs of the original commercial pattern.
The pattern is very late 70s/early 80s in so many ways. The intarsia details are only on the front and sleeves. There are only two sizes, and they’re very close in actual measurements. There’s no full fashioning on the raglan seams. Perhaps most noticeably compared to today’s patterns, the neck is done on straight needles and then seamed over one of the back shoulders. That last bit would horrify a lot of today’s knitters, but hey, they’d already be freaking out at the mandatory seaming the intarsia demands.
I did some math with the help of my copy of Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, and figured out that if I followed the instructions for the smaller size but just made it longer, I could make an adult-sized sweater for Cathy.
To get the sweater to be the right size with minimal math, I used an even thicker yarn than the 70s chunky called for in the pattern. Lion Brand’s Wool-Ease Thick & Quick has a name with a lot of assumptions (just because the yarn is thick does not make the thing quick to make), but it got the job done here.
Then, because intarsia, I found myself with a lot of leftover yarn. I don’t tend to have a lot of yarn in this weight in my stash, so I decided to use it up by making a bunch of hats and winter headbands.
The results are in the gallery below, including Cathy being a good sport and doing her best Danny imitation.
And now I really have to finish the actual, main gift project!
