My $3,000 Guaranteed Weight Loss Sweater

springlering62 · January 29

My sweater is worth at least $3,000 and saved me tens of thousands of calories.

How, you ask?

Over 300 hours invested, figuring my time at a mere $10 per hour. You can’t have dirty hands while doing needlework, and hands busy elsewhere aren’t mainlining sweets and treats into my mouth.

This is, btw, “bedspread weight” cotton thread, not yarn, although a yarn sweater I saw on Etsy inspired it. Each square takes a little less than 30 minutes.

How are you keeping YOUR hands occupied?

Next up, a needlepoint housewarming pillow for a Tuxedo cat owner. Have a very short timeline on this one. Must be done in two weeks. No time to snack for sure.

Lulabelbo · January 29

Beautiful!

tulips_and_tea · January 29

That is a very beautiful sweater! Great work and great idea for a thread. I have no hobbies like that currently (really should try to learn something), but I recently adopted an 8-year-old cat who loves to be petted, so my hands are definitely busy a lot more now!

ddsb1111 · January 29

I’m super impressed and love this post. Hope you update with the finished tuxedo cat.

Alatariel75 · January 29

Amazing!! I love your work, and your outlook!!

springlering62 · January 30

Alatariel75 wrote: »

Amazing!! I love your work, and your outlook!!

And I’m still laughing about the lady with the red light belt wanting to know how to log her “600 calorie an hour loss”.

Give that woman some thread and a needle.

poodle_whisper · January 30

as an aside...these granny square sweaters are all the rage and very hot right now. maybe you could start an etsy shop and make some of that 3k back

springlering62 · January 30

@poodle_whisper when I look at the Etsy ads for $100 I have this sad image of some poor Asian woman sweating to churn these things out. I know the work involved.

I know this and still, when I went to one of the Stans last year and made an offer on a suzani, the woman looked at me hard, and said “do you know how much work I have in this?” I gave her full price and apologized. Then I sat with her for a few minutes while she showed me the technique. She used a hoop and tiny crochet hook. Amazing. A suzani style by me is next, after I finish the tuxedo cat pillow.

Everyone else was middlemen and never brought it up. I felt dreadful for the women selling so cheap that the middlemen were cheap and still had room to negotiate.

I’m going to Guatemala soon with a textile tour that insists on fair value for makers. I like that and will respect it. I just got carried away on the last trip. There was so much, and it was so beautiful. Taking a weaving class there, too. Excited!

AdahPotatah2024 · January 30

Ohhh, I want your sweater!:D

yirara · January 30

Wow, that's different, and very nice! I'm more of a fleece kind of person to be honest, but I do appreciate those things as long as I don't need to do them myself. Give me a hammer, powertools, whatever. No needles please.

CNoelA83 · February 2

I LOVE you sweater. My mom crochets, I should have her make me something similar.

springlering62 · February 3

CNoelA83 wrote: »

I LOVE you sweater. My mom crochets, I should have her make me something similar.

If she does, you OWE her. That would be a true labor of love!

TracyL963 · February 3

Crafts are great for keeping hands occupied. I'm just getting back to cross-stitch. Right now I'm attempting to copy a yoga cat that I saw on the internet. I love your tuxedo kitty!

nossmf · February 3

The church I grew up in (before I left town with the military and settled down elsewhere) teaches its parishioners how to assemble handmade blankets, either through crochet or sewing together squares of random fabrics. These blankets are then donated to people in need, whether homeless or the hospital for injured patients or to the Red Cross for distribution around the country for natural disaster relief. My parents have really taken this to heart, with my father especially churning them out as fast as humanly possible, which even for the simplest projects still requires a week or two to complete.

Mad respect for anybody keeping these traditions alive.

AnnPT77 · February 4

That's a beautiful coat, and as someone who knows how to crochet, has done larger items in the past like afghans, shawls (thin crochet cotton in that, not even yarn!), etc. . . . I can understand how much work that is. Good show, both process and results!

You're much more productive than I am.

I do a lot of misbegotten craft projects for fun/distraction, and often recommend that to others to distract or as a non-food way to avoid bored/stressed eating "hobbies". As you say, things that require clean hands are good. So are things that create dirty ones.

These days, I do some mixed-media visual journaling, which is unproductive in the sense of not creating an objectively useful end product. However, it serves some of the same distraction, self-reflection, and stress-management purposes as more common text journaling . . . plus gets my hands all mucked up with paint, glue, pigment/dye sprays, and more.

In my rare productive moments, I make jewelry.

This was one of my more time-consuming things from a while back, which took a fair share of my time for most of a week - so way less than 300 hours, maybe 30-40? Dunno, wasn't tracking. The big and medium bumpy round beads are made of off-loom bead-woven tiny beads, and so are the earrings. Photo is kind of dark, in real life it's somewhat dark, but mostly purplish and bronzeish. It's hard to do such tiny/dark-color things now, because of several conspiring vision problems that I think are going to be permanent. I still do smaller things with larger beads.

I'm trying to work myself up to doing more sewing again, which I used to do a lot. I finally got the sewing room (a.k.a. laundry room) mostly swamped out and organized, which makes that more realistic.

I agree, crafts are good.

My $3,000 Guaranteed Weight Loss Sweater

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