This year, while DH was off at the Sasquatch festival over Memorial Day weekend, I decided to clean out my closet. I hadn’t done a thorough job of this in about 6 years, during which time:

• we moved from TX to OR,
• I quit my day job, and
• I lost ~10 pounds (from not eating fast food for lunch at work every day!)

Obviously, it was high time for a purge, just from the lifestyle changes.

But also, I was feeling pretty dismayed about how non-cute my wardrobe had become, and I felt like I was old and didn’t know how to dress anymore. For a person who has always had an abiding love of clothing & fashion, this was tres distressing. (In my defense, I had one other big life change, which put a damper on a lot of things: both my parents had passed away. Kinda makes you not care so much about clothes for a while.)

Anyway, in preparation for the Big Closet Cleaning Event, I read and re-read a lot of books along the lines of “how to clean out your closet” etc. Also I spent some time looking through copies of InStyle, my favorite fashion magazine. I figured I already knew a lot about personal style and clothing – I was sure I just needed a little refresher on modernizing my look. Instead, I experienced a complete wardrobe paradigm shift.

One book suggested collecting “tear sheets” of stuff you see in catalogs and magazines that you like, and then making a collage of them. I already had a pile of tear sheets, so I thought I’d try it. I sat down with scissors, a big piece of cardboard, and spray adhesive, and collaged away (it was a ton of fun, BTW). Then I sat back and took a look at my creation. And boy, was I shocked!!

The collage looked very cute, very cool, and very UNLIKE PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING IN MY CLOSET. Towards the end of the weekend, in another book (Full Frontal Fashion), I stumbled over the word that summed up the look of the collage, and the word I’ve now adopted as the acid test for my wardrobe choices.

The word is “sassy".

Over that long weekend, I realized that, for years, I’d been dressing and shopping for my job as an engineer. Even, to some extent, after I’d quit.  In my 11 year engineering career, I held three different jobs at three different companies, and experienced difficulties related to being an attractive female in every one of them. But, Being An Engineer was a big part of my identity, so I chose clothing in styles that played down my femininity, even off the job.

I’d especially been avoiding styles that were cute, revealing, body-hugging, or sexy. Nothing that was fitted. No v-necks. No sheer fabrics. No “fun” accessories; no belts to emphasize the waistline or the hips. No lace, lacing, beads, sequins, ruffles, or bows…

…but that’s what was all over my collage.

No wonder I was unhappy with all my clothes!

How on earth, do you ask, does this have anything to do with knitting? Well, unfortunately, this lack of sassiness also seems to apply to many of the things I have knitted to date. Now that the weather is getting cooler here and I’m digging out the handknits again, I am realizing that most of them are JUST NOT SASSY.

Thus, being a woman of action, I have joined the Sexy Knitter’s Club, though I have not yet joined in a knit-along. I have vowed from here on out to only knit things that fit the sassy bill. And here is one of the first FO’s in that category.

It started out as a version of Jenna Adorno’s “Tempting", which was in Knitty’s Winter 2004 issue, and can be found here. I also liked her “Ultra Femme” sweater in “Stich & Bitch Nation", of which I don’t have a pic – but it starts out similarly at the bottom, then switches to fine mohair at the waistline and shows a whole lot of black bra underneath. Hmmm. Maybe a little TOO sassy?

So I kept the idea of the yarn change, but moved it up to a more modest point. Finally, I ditched the ribbon tie around the neck, and added standard raglan shaping instead. Voila! SASSY!

Yarns used: bottom: Brown Sheep "Cotton Fleece" in "Twilight Green" top: Cleckheaton "Flowerdale"