Movie Sweater Projects!

Since two of my main obsessions/hobbies are knitting and watching movies, of course I love to find ways to combine the two! Knitting while watching movies is obvious, and something I do pretty much every single day, but I also like to plan out projects around my movie watching sometimes.

Before I started my new graphic design career, I mostly just knit accessories I was designing, then when I was no longer designing patterns I started mainly knitting sweaters. When I was knitting the plain body of this Ocean pullover (ravelry link) in 2019, I decided to take it with me to a movie in the theater and, whoa, game changer! I learned that as long as my knitting is plain knitting around-and-around I could fully knit for 2 hours straight in the dark, no problem!

So I knit the entire body of that one in theaters, and when that was done I immediately planned out my next movie theater project. This time, I planned a striped sweater where each stripe would be one movie.

I picked out two colors in a soft cotton-blend yarn and started taking it to movies in January 2020, making it to four movies before… you know. That stopped being an option. So, the bottom 4 stripes were knit in theaters to Dark Waters, Color Out of Space, Birds of Prey, and Frozen II. Then the rest of the body stripes I knit to movies at home: It Chapter II, Transit, The Half of It, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Then I just knit stripes to match for the sleeves and top:

I didn’t start going back to movies in the theater until summer of last year. At that time, I had my Improvised Cable-Yoke Sweater body on the needles so I had that in theaters until I completed the body. Once I started getting used to going to the theater and knew that was part of my life once again, I started planning a new theater sweater, of course! I picked out a buuuunch of coordinating colors and swatched up the yarn and picked out a pattern (Tensho—rav link), then I knit the bottom colorwork section at home. Oh I actually knit the bottom ribbing in a theater but I did conclude that stockinette is the ideal theater knitting!

So for this one, I started really keeping track of the movie knitting more, keeping a log in my ravelry notes of each movie stripe and the rating I gave each movie!

Bottom ribbing (Mt Scott colorway): Anatomy of a Fall (rating 9 stars/10)
Solid chunk above the bottom colorwork (Mt Scott colorway): Killers of the Flower Moon (8/10)
Springfield stripe: Priscilla (8/10)
Italian Ice Speckle stripe: Saltburn (4/10)
Cattail: Dream Scenario (7/10)
Foster Powell: Godzilla Minus One (7/10)
Mt Scott: Poor Things (9/10)
Springfield: The Boy and the Heron (7/10)
Italian Ice Speckle: All of Us Strangers (7/10)
Cattail: Past Lives (10/10) (only knit for half the movie) & The Zone of Interest (9/10)

And then for the sleeves—two at a time (always!)—I decided to also do movie stripes, but at home because I can’t be messing with magic loop tangles and shaping in the dark!

Sleeve solid chunk above the bottom colorwork (Northstar Kettle): Ordet (8/10)
Springfield stripe: Pather Panchali (8/10)
Italian Ice Speckle: Amanda (7/10)
Cattail: I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (8/10)
Foster Powell: Dead Pigs (7/10)
Springfield: The Battle of Algiers (9/10)
Italian Ice Speckle: Häxan (6/10)
Cattail: Incendies (8/10)

Once I finished the theater body section of the above sweater, I immediately started a new theater project, an improvised tee (rav link)! This one is just a box with a wide mitered neckline, and I did the colored movie stripes rotating between three colors, with 1-row white stripes between them. Those stripes were helpful—I took the time to knit them at home and inspect the previous movie stripe for errors, since the silk-blend yarn was slippery and I’d often split a stitch or something else that I could just drop down and fix at home.

Stripe 1 (orange): American Fiction (rating 7/10)
Stripe 2 (green): Lisa Frankenstein (8/10)
Stripe 3 (aqua): Drive Away Dolls (7/10)
Stripe 4 (orange): Problemista (9/10)
Stripe 5 (green): Immaculate (7/10)
Stripe 6 (aqua): Late Night with the Devil (7/10)
Stripe 7 (orange): Monkey Man (7/10)
Stripe 8 (green): Challengers (7/10)
Stripe 9 (aqua): Civil War (6/10)
Stripe 10 (orange): Abigail (7/10)
Stripe 11 (green): I Saw the TV Glow (10/10)
Stripe 12 (aqua): Evil Does Not Exist (8/10)
Stripe 13 (orange): Furiosa (7/10)

Once I completed the body of that one, I planned out my next theater knitting, doing something different this time. I decided I wanted to use up some leftovers—specifically, the tote bag full of small balls left over from my Hue Shift blanket project (rav link) from a few years ago! (That blanket was also a movie project, but this post is about sweaters, so I’ll talk about that another time!) The blanket used 40 colors and I had small quantities of almost all of them, in worsted superwash wool.

I decided to hold it double for a quick and warm sweater, making marled stripes, and I planned out the order of the stripes and approximately how they’d marl when held together.

Once I got started, I thought about how this project would work as a theater project, and I made a couple of giant balls of pre-spliced yarn to work from. I started with purples at the bottom, so then I spliced together through all the shades of blues and greens, so that I could just knit and knit and not worry about color changes.

I used the Carbeth pattern (with some minor mods but basically as written) and because of how the stripes worked, there’s no correspondence with this one between the stripes and the movies I knit to. But I think the movies I knit the body in were: It’s Such a Beautiful Day, A Quiet Place: Day One, The Fall Guy, Kinds of Kindness, and Longlegs.

I think this will get a lot of wear in the winter—it’s so cozy and warm! There are some things I’d do differently if I were to make it again, particularly with the yoke stripes, but I actually ran out of my Hue Shift leftovers in the yoke and I had to scramble with my stash to find some pink and red yarns to make it work. So, not exactly as I envisioned, but pretty close!

And of course I have another movie project on the needles right now! This one is another cotton-blend sweatshirt-y kinda vibe, in allll different colors. I’m knitting the body in theaters and the sleeves to movies at home (rav link).

Above is a shot I took a couple of movies ago—sleeves are finished there. I may have finished the body in a movie yesterday, not sure, but below is the body now. And here are the movies and ratings!

Body (in theaters):
(grey) Twisters (rating 6/10)
(dark blue) Trap (7/10)
(light blue) Cuckoo (7/10)
(coral) Alien: Romulus (7/10)
(green) Strange Darling (7/10)
(dark red) Blink Twice (6/10)
(light green) Red Rooms (8/10)
(white) Inside Out 2 (7/10)
(yellow) The Substance (8/10)

Sleeves (at home)—different colors for the two sleeves:
Femme (cuffs) (4/10)
Fancy Dance (8/10)
Oddity (7/10)
Holy Spider (7/10)
Tótem (8/10)
Rebel Ridge (7/10)

If you love both movies and knitting, I recommend theater knitting! And if you like adding a kind of game/randomized element to your knitting, try movie stripes. I think it’s fun for the stripes to be slightly different widths because there’s a meaning behind each one. Nerdy maybe but I like it!