My October Horror Movie Sweater Project!

After rounding up all my movie theater sweaters in September, I decided to plan out a horror movie sweater for October, since I had a plan to watch as many horror movies as possible in the month! And since I’d be knitting at home instead of in theaters, I could do more than round-and-round stockinette. So I picked out yarn from my stash and a cardigan pattern to go with it!

And thennnn, since I’m in a trying-out-new-things phase, I decided to try out doing a series of youtube videos to talk about the project as I did it. I recorded a video each Thursday of the month, showing my sweater progress and talking about each movie I watched while knitting, concluding with showing the just-finished sweater on the 31st!

The first week I introduced the project, talked about the Jill Draper Makes Stuff yarn I used, and the Amy Herzog pattern (from Knit Wear Love) I chose, and I shared the first three movies I’d watched while knitting the first three stripes.

Then I kind of let the videos evolve… I’d originally thought I wouldn’t talk about the movies very much, but then when recording, I just… did talk about them much. Oops. So, oh well, that’s what the videos became, mostly my silly little movie reviews.

In week 3 I learned how to add clips from the movies into the video so there’s more to look at than just me. Part of this video project was me learning to make videos, using software I’d never used before to edit, use a new mic, etc. I actually went to college partially for filmmaking (I was a “media arts” major which included a lot of film) so I did a lot of video making then, but that was over 20 years ago! So I was using different cameras and software, and I also pretty much forgot everything I learned back then anyway.

So this has been a fun little experiment. I’ve definitely learned a lot. I enjoyed doing it, but not sure where I’ll go next with video-making. I might make video tutorials for some of the knitting techniques that I had tutorials for on my old knitting site that doesn’t exist anymore. But not sure what would be useful, what doesn’t already have tons of tutorials on youtube already. Let me know if there’s something you want to see!

There’s a playlist on my youtube channel with all five videos if you want to check them out. There are multiple “Lee Does Stuff” accounts on youtube that aren’t me btw; I’m just Lee Meredith over there. My channel has a bunch of very old knitting tutorial videos, which were meant to just accompany patterns that used the techniques. And then there are some fun little videos from my Color Squared book too.

I talked about the cardigan construction in the videos, especially in the last one when it was finished. I even included a quick little afterthought pockets tutorial in that last video! I love how it turned out!

I included timestamps throughout all the videos, so if you just want to see the knitting content you can skip the movies, or you can just watch the movie bits that interest you. I didn’t ramble toooo much about each movie, but they add up so the videos are a bit more lengthy than intended. Oh well! I also edited all the captions so they’re somewhat accurate, and I included all the links I could think of in the descriptions. And for each movie I put on the screen where they are currently streaming!

I enjoyed doing this so I’m thinking about planning another movie knitting project for March to go along with the March Around the World challenge (that I blogged about here). I might encourage other knitters to join me in doing a movie-knitting sweater that month, like with an instagram hashtag and stuff… might be fun??

For now, I encourage everyone to knit while watching movies because it’s the best!!

Oh and lastly, I ended up watching a total of 70 horror movies in October!! See them all in a letterboxd list here. My favorites that I recommend are: La Llorona, Vampire’s Kiss, Infested, Slay, Ghostwatch, Vamp, Tammy & the T-Rex, Die Alone, As Above So Below, Woman of the Hour (not reeeally horror but has horror elements for sure), and Caddo Lake which is totally not horror but I watched it mistakenly thinking it was and ended up loving it!