Sleepless in Sweater Weather

We’re already nearing the end of September, and depending on your metric, we’re either well into Sweater Weather season or just about to embark upon it. But when does it genuinely arrive? Is it when the temperature drops down to a certain degree? Does it immediately follow the unofficial end of summer (Labor Day), or do we wait until the official start of autumn (Sept. 22)? Is it when the screenshots of Mr. Autumn Man start making their way around Twitter? What about the photo of Lenny Kravitz with the gigantic scarf wrapped around his neck? Is it the day Starbucks starts offering Pumpkin Spice Lattés and the rest of its fall menu items? (I’m more of a Salted Caramel Mocha person myself; justice for the SCM!) When we finally break out the Halloween decorations? How about when the leaves change color and start to fall? Or do we only need to look at the cozy characters of cinema and feel envy for them for it to kick in?

It’s more of a state of mind, I suppose? I know that by the time my birthday comes around in mid-October, we’re well into mental fall, even in recent years when it would be 80 degrees outside on my actual birthday.

I, for one, welcome our Autumn Overlords. Now please send me all the sweater recommendations you have because as much as I write about them, I don’t own that many cozy sweaters, and I would like to invest in some good-quality ones. Or maybe this will be the year I finally make a damn cozy sweater for myself. Maybe. (Go and yell at me if I haven’t at least started making one by this time next year.)

The Knit: Dear Björn

Pattern: Ravelry / Payhip / LoveCrafts

Yarn: Malabrigo Sock in Indonesia

You know that adage of “buying items for [insert activity] is a different hobby than doing [insert activity]?” Fill in the brackets with whatever you wish, but it may not surprise you that there is a yarn/knitting equivalent to that adage.

While I use most of the yarn I buy, I’ve often fallen into the trap of buying skeins with a vague project in mind and then taking months or years—if I ever get around to it—actually to use it. And it’s primarily because the yarn is gorgeous, more so if it is variegated (e.g., several different colors or shades of one color). This has more or less resulted in me forbidding myself from buying more yarn for the rest of the year, even though the NYC Yarn Crawl is almost upon us.

As I purchased a lot of those skeins (I’m really into yellows lately), my logic was I don’t have to worry about if this color is too bold for me to wear because I’ll use it to make socks. With socks, you can go as wacky as you want with the color, and if nobody can see them or notice that it doesn’t exactly go with the rest of your outfit, who gives a shit, right?

That’s not to say that Indonesia, the green/blue/purple skein I picked up more recently at Knitty City, is wacky. I just liked it, and out of the many skeins I had rolled up in my yarn tub, it felt like the right fit for a pattern I’ve wanted to try for a while. And Dear Björn is one of those patterns that looked cool and combined one thing I love (cables) and one I’m still relatively new at (knitting toe-up, which sounds just like you think it does). Add in some math, and there’s the near-constant anxiety that you mucked up the numbers, and you chose a size that’ll be too small, and after all that work, the damn socks won’t fit my gigantic feet.

The Flick: Sleepless in Seattle

Streaming: HBO Max

I’ve been spending the past few years making a concerted effort to catch up on the movies I should’ve gotten around to watching for one reason or another. Sometimes, I can’t tell you why I didn’t see that movie everyone loves. Other times, I might’ve thought it was dumb, avoided it out of spite because everyone thought I’d love it, or didn’t like the genre in general. Rom-coms tended to fall into the latter category as I, in my misguided teen years, took the “cool girl” route of thinking I wasn’t like all of the other girls and believed romance and rom-coms were dumb as hell, overly contrived, and full of overdone tropes; one of my least-favorites: withholding vital information that eventually blows up in that person’s face. Very few of those books and films met my near-impossible demands for what made a good one, so I didn’t watch or read many of them. The ones I did like were either the “classics” (e.g., Jane Austen’s novels) or rarely had a happily ever after (HEA), which, according to the one hard rule of romance, doesn’t make them a romance—at least on the book side of things. (Internalized misogyny’s a bitch, isn’t it?)

I wasn’t entirely wrong about the overabundance of tropes in romances and rom-coms, but as I got older, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it was all about execution. And as I did some mental deprogramming, and, to put it mildly, got over myself, I opened myself up to a world filled with great romances and great rom-coms. When Harry Met Sally used to be just about the fake orgasm at Katz’s Deli, but now it’s one of my favorite movies. Roman Holiday is another I mostly knew by name, but now I love it enough that I have a poster for it in my room. And the joke’s on past me now because I’ve already read 74 romances since I started tracking my books last year, and that number will rise before the end of the year. In short, romances rule.

This leads us to Sleepless in Seattle, a famous Nora Ephron rom-com that I had never seen. My friend Hannah loves it, but she also thought I wouldn’t, perhaps partly because she’s heard my rant on the most unbelievable part of You’ve Got Mail, which is probably the one you think it is; I know, I’ll get to it eventually. And sure, there were some light-hearted nitpicks I texted to Hannah, especially around the logistics of Annie’s (Meg Ryan) job as a journalist. (I am not a huge fan of most women journalists in the movies for all the reasons you’d expect, although this one didn’t bug me as much as others.)

But y’all, this movie is so good. The writing is sharp, Ryan and Tom Hanks are great in it, and the absolute build-up to their eventual meeting ramps up the sexual tension and yearning in a way that I can only describe as *chef kiss*. I had thought, for so long, that Sleepless in Seattle was a fall movie (it’s set between Christmas Eve and Valentine’s Day) and that Annie and Sam (Hanks) had spent more than two scenes together, but apparently not. And it worked anyway while their chemistry pops off the screen? Incredible stuff here.

What I’m Reading

• The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston: I spotted most of the twists a mile away (and it takes its sweet time revealing what you already figured out around page 40), but a delightful book that works as a family story and a romance.

• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy: So it turns out that the buzzy and splashy celebrity memoir is just as good as everyone said it was.

• If you want some key to unlocking part of why I am the way I am, know that I watched an obscene amount of M*A*S*H—which just turned 50!—in syndication as a kid. So many of the jokes probably went way over my head back then, but it’s one of the first shows I remembered having a favorite episode for. (“None Like It Hot,” aka the season 7 episode where Hawkeye and B.J. ordered a bathtub and Radar gets his tonsils taken out, really landed for an 8-year-old.)

Shameless Plugs

• House of the Dragon or The Rings of Power? Yes, I went full-on “both, both is good.”

• And speaking of HOTD, let’s talk about the great memes it’s creating amid the lore deep-dives.

• The 60th annual New York Film Festival officially kicks off on Sept. 30, but my time with it starts this Monday. So head over to Twitter to keep up with the movies I’ll be watching for the next three weeks.

Knit-Date: Doctor Who Scarf

I won’t have this section in every newsletter—for one, I’m not the world’s fastest knitter—but I will often finish a piece I previously featured here and want to show it off. Mostly kicked off by the fact that I spent the past four months knitting the Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf, and I would like to show it off. (And Gritty, of course.) The best part? My client loved it, which made my day.

And before you ask. No, I am not taking any more commissions right now. The scarf was a one-off piece, and I mainly took it because I didn’t have any major projects in the works, and I was curious about how I’d feel about doing a commission. (I also have a day job that makes this very impractical as an actual source of revenue.) So we’ll see if that changes anytime soon.

Knitwear of the Week

Knit: An oversized, tan turtleneck sweater that fits right in with the cottagecore aesthetic

Worn By: Harper (Jessie Buckley), who pairs it with pink pants and is about a minute away from being mansplained by the first of many Rory Kinnears, in Men.

Costume Designer: Lisa Duncan

I liked Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, well enough when I saw it back in June, although I’ve since cooled on it a bit. But this is the point of KotW: Mid-to-bad movies aren’t exempt from containing great knitwear. Like, I would wear this sweater even though I don’t know if it would look good on me, and I usually avoid the pink undertones this has; honestly, it reminds me a bit of the discontinued Purl Soho yarn color Honey Pink that I used to make a scarf and a complementary hat. (I’ve got some photos on Instagram—scroll through until you find it—if Rav isn’t your speed.)

Want to nominate your own Knitwear of the Week?

If you didn’t see my previous newsletter (it was more of a quiet release to get it out), I’m now offering you, the reader, a chance to nominate your favorite piece of cinematic knitwear. I’ve got more information about what I’m looking for here. So, if you’ve got one, send an email over to [email protected] with your pick!