All about finding happiness in messes with my new sweater design
December 14, 2026
My new design is a striped, stash-busting raglan sweater with two bows on top. The colors clash and vy for attention and when you squint it blurs into brown. Stripes are about color, and these colors don’t go together, but they do bring me happiness. They’re a mess, yes, and they bring me happiness. Let’s call that happi-mess?
Not quite a traditional raglan, Dirty Bertie features ventilation slits to support all the sports you like to do in your handknits. Or, on a more practical note, these bows are purely decorative. Too, I find that the bow ties and finishing details allow for us to highlight one saturated hue from the palette. I think that uplifting one hue from the murky depths of a mishmash of happy clashing can really bring the whole mess home.
I said that the design is an ode to the happi-mess, but what’s “happy” about it?
Me with Danielle Mohlman (@daniellemohlman on Instagram) after LA Yarn Crawl; Danielle in their Olga Jacket in colorways from Evil Fruit Colorway Collection, and me in all the colorways from Fiction X DEGEN Colorway Collection.
HAPPINESS # 1:
The Happiness of Stash-busting
Knitters carry a steady enthusiasm for stealthily earmarking old yarn for new projects. In an uncharacteristic celebration of excess, we call it stashbusting. The function of stashbusting is to justify a renewal of vows in our monastic future of building a more pure stash that will make us appear less coveting in nature, even though we are some of the most coveting people to walk this Earth or pet a sheep. This new pattern will use up six colors of your once-favored, now nearly forgotten but impossible to give away, dk weight yarn.
The joy is not in having the perfect colors, but enabling clashing to thrive; each color breaking through the noise against all odds.
Stripe sequencing is super fun, and necessarily obsessive at the start of this project. Because certain colors next to other colors dull or brighten both colors, it’s a tricky business deciding who sits next to who. I wrote a newsletter about this last year, but if you are new to this newsletter, you can read the blog version here: Fine Stripes in A Six-Color Sequence
HAPPINESS # 2:
The Happiness of Making Something Unlikely Work
Even if you do select and buy every color for the Dirty Bertie Sweater, as I did by choosing to go with one color each from the Fiction X Degen Colorway Collection, it’s not easy in the slightest to commit to a stripe sequence when you have six colorways in the mix. The complexity is enhanced beyond the aforementioned when you begin to look at how these fine stripes blend in the eye when seen as a whole sweater. Do they blend to a fine mud? Maybe they do, and maybe you decide that works. Once the bows are added, it says, ‘Yes, I have decided: this works.’ There is such happiness is making something work when you weren’t sure at first if you could.
HAPPINESS # 3:
The Happiness of Putting Bows On a Mess
Happiness cannot exist if we never notice it when we’re happy. If we remember being happy, it doesn’t mean the moment of remembering becomes happy. It’s a thing that, cliche as it is, relies on being present. Now, being a present relies on there being a bow on top. Sometimes when we’re in a mess, it’s hard to tell that we’re happy. There may be stress, overwhelm, sadness, but also happiness. The metaphor I’m slamming hard here is that the bow is like our flagging of our own happiness. Of noting, I’m happy in this moment. That’s what the bows do on Dirty Bertie–they say, yes we are a sweater that is clashing and yes it is intentional and yes we are happy about it as demonstrated very clearly by our bows.
Who knows why since everything about our lives is totally normal right now in the world, but doesn’t putting bows on messes feel like an inalienable survival skill lately? When you put a bow (or two as is the case with Dirty Bertie), you are saying, done, complete, yes, it is a mess but it can also be a little bit happy in between. We can’t be happy all the time about all things, but you can be happy about your sweater. Whether you went with a messy splash of incoherent colors locked forever in battle, or a finely tuned palette that resisted all best intentions of imperfection, adding bows is a statement of transformation. Lemons into lemonade, bobs into sweaters, and double-bows on top as a big vote of confidence upon what may be messy, but must also include a bit of happiness in order to remain sane.
