Meet the dude who knits sweaters of places, then visits them
Like many of us, Baltimore's Sam Barsky likes to bring along a sweater when he's on vacation.
The difference is that he's knitted the sweater himself, and that it also happens to feature the same landmarks he's visiting.
Photos of Barsky's sweaters have recently gone viral after they reached the front page of Reddit. He has created 103 different sweaters, which feature images ranging from Stonehenge, to Times Square, to a shark tank inside of an aquarium. It's something he's been doing for quite some time.
"I started knitting in March 1999 and made two solid colored sweaters followed from a pattern," Barsky told Mashable via email.
Seeking a challenge, in August 2000 he created his very own pictorial sweater, without following a pattern, as an experiment.
"After that was a success, I've been knitting sweaters like that one after another, featuring either generic scenery or specific landmarks. Anything that crosses my eyes is a potential sweater," he explained.
"The two most recent ones I did, the Bahai Gardens and the Dead Sea, were made for a trip I took in December to Israel."
But they don't always feature famous landmarks. Sometimes these sweaters can be of wonderfully ordinary things -- such as his sweater which has power lines on it.
Barsky is currently working on two knits: One is of fictional animated R&B group, the California Raisins, while the other features civil rights pioneer, Martin Luther King Jr.
"I'm hoping to have both done by the end of the week," he said. "The Raisin sweater is for a dance at the end of the week in which the theme is "California Raisins," and the MLK sweater is for the upcoming holiday."
Surprisingly, the idea to take pictures in front of the landmark featured on his sweaters only came along later in Barsky's knitting career.
"To this day, I have pictures while wearing 91 of the 103 sweaters around the exact landmark or style of scenery or something quite similar, and I have a goal of doing this for all of them, though most of the remaining ones will require travel to other continents," he said.
Sounds like something *knit* for the faint-hearted.
Topics Reddit
