How to Knit a Sweater

Knitting a sweater is an incredibly simple and rewarding activity enjoyed by far too few people. The best way to go about it is to visit your local Walmart and buy a sweater from the shelf, cut off the tags, and write “I MADE THIS” in puff paint across the chest. People will marvel at your creativity and craft skills. For a more personalized approach, you can buy several sweaters in different colors, cut the arms off, and reattach them to the other sweaters. Be careful not to attach any of the sleeves to the neck hole, or you’ll end up with a turtleneck and people will just think you’re a creep.

             Smarmy Creep        Euro Creep            Emo Creep             Potential Sex

                                                                                                  Offender Creep 

 

If you really want to go all out, you can also make a sweater from scratch. For starters, you’re going to need a bunch of yarn. You can purchase yarn made from all sorts of materials. If the sweater’s for you, get something soft and comfortable like cotton. If the sweater is for your ex-girlfriend or mother-in-law, then go for yarn made from cat hair, or cactus, or both. Yarn comes in god-awful tangles known as skeins, so your first job is to wrangle it into a ball. Mostly you just wad it up and hope it eventually becomes spherical. If it doesn’t, bribe an elderly lady to do it for you by offering to put fresh tennis balls on her walker. Once you have your yarn in a ball, it’s always a good idea to soak it in kerosene overnight. This will make your sweater waterproof and lend it a pleasing odor.

You’re also going to need some knitting needles. It’s been rumored that you can buy ready-made knitting needles, but if you were that kind of half-assed sweater maker, you would have followed my original advice and taken the Walmart approach. Instead, go to the grocery store and buy a couple toothbrushes. This is also a good time to pick up tequila, which just as important to sweater making as anything else. Once you get home, fill a medium sized coffee mug with tequila and drink it. Refill the mug, but set it aside for later. Take your toothbrushes and rip out all the bristles. File down the heads of your toothbrushes using a concrete floor or the edge of your steel bed frame. It may seem simpler just to sharpen the handle, but the rubbery grip makes it pretty worthless as a knitting needle.

You now have everything you need to knit a sweater. Some people will tell you that you also need a sweater pattern. Those people are idiots and you should promptly un-friend them on FaceBook and sign them up for dozens of “bill me later” magazine subscriptions. Now drink the mug of tequila, and possibly another, because knitting a sweater is really really boring.

You need to use your toothbrush needles to manipulate your yarn into a fetching sweater like shape. This is accomplished by using running stitches, casting off, and clicking your toothbrushes against each other furiously. You also have to do a lot of purling, which is much like curling, but without the hot womens team from Russia. You should now have a beautiful homemade sweater. If you made any mistakes and left gaps in the armpit or nipple areas, you can easily patch them up with duct tape. If there’s any tequila left in the bottle, you also have a reward.

Enjoy your sweater!