GEIS-新闻详情

Every day is sweater weather in Sam Barsky’s world

2023-09-04 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

Listen 6 min

Comment on this story Comment

Strangers recognize Sam Barsky all the time. They recognize him when he’s walking through a Trader Joe’s in his home state of Maryland, and they recognize him when he’s visiting a national landmark elsewhere in the country. He used to describe himself as anonymous enough that he could shop at a Walmart without being noticed. Then he was recognized in one of those, too.

Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight

Maybe you’ve seen Barsky in person or online? The 48-year-old has gained internet fame for the artistic sweaters he knits by hand, without the aid of patterns. Many of his creations feature landmarks that he has seen or plans to visit, and the photos and videos he posts of them on social media (usually showing him in front of those landmarks) have drawn clicks from knitters and non-knitters alike.

On TikTok, he has more than 250,000 followers, and on Instagram, he has about 230,000.

But before all of that, before the followers and the fanfare, before he ever completed his first stitch, Barsky was a child diagnosed with a learning disability whose parents moved the family from a Washington suburb to the Baltimore region so he could attend a school that could meet his needs.

“It was obvious when I was younger that I couldn’t fit into a regular school,” Barsky told me on a recent evening. “Every time I tried one out, it was a disaster. I could only thrive in special-education classes.”

He describes his parents as doing “all the right things.” He says they made sacrifices for him and believed in his abilities.

How strangers rallied to give students with disabilities a class trip

“They told me I would do something very successful in my life,” he says. “Of course, it was a question of what.”

Barsky initially decided that the “what” was in the medical field. He enrolled in a community college and started studying nursing. Then, as he tells it, he experienced some health problems and dropped out. Suddenly, he was 24 and unsure what to do with his life. No other courses at the college interested him.

A short time later, he saw a stand at a flea market selling yarn. He had tried, and failed, to learn to knit on his own in the past. He asked the people at the stand where he could go to learn. They told him they would teach him free at their yarn store.

Barsky recalls showing up for his first lesson wearing a commercially made paisley sweater. He wanted to show his instructor what he hoped to create.

“She said that was for experienced knitters only and that she would start me off with a solid-colored scarf,” he recalls. He created that scarf using a yellow yarn. Then, with the help of another shop, he made a solid-teal sweater. A year and a half after his first lesson, he created a sweater of his own design. “That’s when I realized this is what I wanted to do with my life.”

Barsky says he sometimes hears from parents of children who are struggling in school confessing to him their worries. Whenever that happens, he always replies in the same way. He assures them that what their children are experiencing now won’t last forever.

Share this article Share

“I try to calm them down,” he says. “I tell them, ‘Once they grow up and are successful at something in life, this won’t matter.’”

Over the years, Barsky has made more than 160 sweaters, each unique. A sweater created to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. features the civil rights leader delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On one sleeve, a bus offers a nod to Rosa Parks, and on the other sleeve, a railroad pays tribute to Harriet Tubman.

Another of Barsky’s sweaters features the U.S. Capitol building on the front and the Washington Monument on the back.

People have offered Barsky thousands of dollars for a single sweater, but he refuses to sell any. He has also turned down requests to make custom sweaters. On his website, he dedicates a page to explaining why he sells T-shirts printed with the designs of the sweaters instead. “The truth is, I very much wish I could produce sweaters for others,” that page reads. “But it is not possible, no matter how much money is offered to me for one.”

One reason he gives: “It takes me an average of at least a month to knit and assemble just one of the sweaters in my collection. It is impossible for me to be a human sweater mill!”

Another reason: “My sweaters in my collection are my wardrobe. I wear them every day, all the time, inside and outside of my home.”

I thought of Barsky on a recent morning when the air was cool enough to conjure thoughts of knitwear. But the truth is, it is always sweater weather for him. He wears his sweaters every day, no matter the temperature outside. He makes many of his sweaters out of cotton and with short sleeves so he can wear them comfortably on hot days.

Some objects will remind us of the pandemic long after it’s over

While Barsky has long been knitting, the pandemic changed his work and reach. It caused him to shift his lens when picking the scenes for his sweaters and expand the ways he shares his work with the public.

Before the pandemic, he and his wife, Deborah, enjoyed traveling to places across the world. When they no longer could do that, they started exploring more local sites. Those backdrops inspired Barsky. He created a set of sweaters featuring places only locals might recognize, such as Jerusalem Mill Village in Harford County and Sugarloaf Mountain near Frederick, Md. (A sweater he created of Baltimore’s Washington Monument recently won first place at the Maryland State Fair).

Barsky says that at the beginning of the pandemic, he started using TikTok to share his creations. More recently, he began using YouTube Shorts to tell the stories behind the sweaters. In a video that shows him wearing a sweater that depicts Oriole Park at Camden Yards, he explains that he ran out of the green yarn he needed to complete the sweater and had to drive an hour away to a D.C. suburb to find it.

His videos exude an earnestness that make it hard to not to smile when you click through them and a confidence that gives no hint of the young man who once struggled to find his path.

“When I was 7 years old or even when I was 17 years old, I never imagined this is what my life would be like at all,” he said.

He never imagined people would recognize him on nature walks or at the recycling center. He never imagined that when he walked up to the Hollywood sign to take a photo in one of his sweaters, an entire tour bus would recognize him.

Comments