A Yellow Sweater

On a lost morning somewhere in the second half of the 1990s I dropped by at my favourite clothes shop, just looking around, because I didn’t really need anything specific. The saleswomen were busy unpacking some boxes with new arrivals. When one of the boxes opened I could not suppress a cry of surprise: all lemon yellow wool sweaters with a grey border. Madness! It was impossible to wear a bright yellow sweater like that!

The saleswomen obviously noticed my instant crush and they made me fit one right away. Less than five minutes later I had a bright yellow sweater, which I then wore so often that people sometimes referred to me as “the one with his yellow sweater”.

I literally wore my yellow sweater to the thread, but couldn’t say goodbye to it, even when I really couldn’t wear it anymore. When I picked up knitting again, one of my first projects was – guess what – a yellow sweater with a grey border. At Kaleidoscope in Sint-Gilles I found a fine merino wool in the same bright yellow. The original sweater was too much out of shape to copy it, but I had a good look at my favourite sweater of the moment and copied it as good as I could. I succeeded rather well I think and I’ve worn my yellow sweater 2.0 for years.

The yellow has lost a bit of its brightness and the light grey hem and cuffs starting fraying after all these years, but the rest of the sweater still looks very fine. So the past few weeks I have launched a recovery operation: I have replaced the hem, the cuffs and the collar with the leftovers of merino wool form my stash and now I can wear my favourite yellow sweater for another decade!