The Gift Sweater KAL

Today, a new phase of our “Year of Sweaters” opens:

Gift Sweater KAL

Holiday season is here, and for many of us gift-knitting season is as also upon us. So for this part of our “Year of Sweaters KAL”, we wanted to take a close look at, and celebrate, sweaters as gifts.

Almost every knitter is a gift knitter at some point in their life. Many of us have also struggled with that decision, at one point or another. So much time, energy, and love are involved in using our hands to create a gift for our loved ones. (And often substantial funds, as well!) It’s nearly impossible not to have expectations and daydreams about the reaction the gift will elicit.


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(Some of my own gift-giving history.)

We imagine them swearing off commercial socks forever; immediately putting on the hat and not taking it off until April; exclaiming with unfeigned delight that they’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

I think, at the heart of it, we imagine them seeing the gift not just for the physical object it is, but as the combination of all that went into it.

And since the thing we have made is useful, we expect to see it used, throughout their lives.

That’s a lot of oomph to place on a gift recipient, and so sometimes as gift knitters we get disappointed. But there are those magical few, those knitworthy gift recipients, who meet our secret expectations and then some. And those wonderful people get gifts forever. Including, sometimes, sweaters.


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Sweaters are never the first thing we knit for someone, since any expectations or secret hopes we have about smaller items? Are tenfold with a sweater.

Sweaters are harder to receive, too. We all have store-bought sweaters we love to wear, so the bar is substantially higher for them as gifts. It’s all too easy (both for us and the recipients) to notice, on a sweater, when this pinches a little bit or that flaps just a bit too much. We have too crisp a frame of reference for what “good” is to let “almost there” slip by.

And yet, there are those special few in our lives for whom we want to knit the ultimate hand-knitted gift. And for those loved ones, CustomFit is a beautiful thing. Because CustomFit lets you create a gift for someone with laser focus on their own taste, in the perfect size, in materials they’ll love.

Forget finding the perfect pattern, the perfect yarn, and then hoping the pairing of the two will work out well. For your most wonderful hand-knit recipients, you can do better. So we hope you’ll join us as we knit-a-long for the holidays, creating sweaters worthy of our dearest and closest.

  • Jackie will be taking on the challenge of recreating one of her own sweaters for an admiring, and high-stakes, recipient.
  • Amy will be creating something new for a very dear friend. (And showing bits and pieces here, due to the very-public nature of the blog!)
  • Lauren will be doing plenty of gift knitting, but joining the KAL only in a “research” capacity this time around. (Her gift sweater is outside the realm of what CustomFit can currently do… …but well within the realm of what we hope it will do within the next year.)

The KAL will run from today, November 16, through December 31. As usual, there will be prizes, a thread in our Ravelry group, and posts & discussions on topics related to gift-sweater-knitting. And also as usual, we can’t wait to see what you create.

So are you ready for a different kind of gift knitting? Grab some needles, and let’s go!

5 thoughts on “The Gift Sweater KAL

  1. Yes, I still feel kind of guilty that my baby was too darn big for your lovely sweater 😉

    1. Awwwwww! So sweet.

  2. Luv your site. Still haven’t worked up the courage to knit a sweater, but am looking forward to using your software when I do.

    BTW, what is the pattern name for the scarf pictured in the second row (beth-gift-2.jpg)? I luv it!

    Mahalo.

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