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Tim Bouma
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Price = Proof of Work / Dot Product
Power in Patterns.
Architecture is Authority.
GM
Ditto
Good Afternoon.
Agents might beat us on intelligence, but they won’t beat us on hope.
Thought of the day:
Global ordering and key rotation are ultimately external to any decentralized protocol. Can be mitigated by proof of work or social recovery.
Blockbuster Movie Spawns a Hit Sweater
BY JOHN JURGENSEN
The Wall Street Journal
Apr 06, 2026
But you have to knit the ‘Project Hail Mary’ cardigan yourself
Could it be the most famous cardigan since Mr. Rogers’s? The hit Ryan Gosling movie “Project Hail Mary” has fans craving the cozy zip-up emblazoned with foxes that his science-teacher hero wears on a mission to save Earth.
But there’s a snag to obtaining this sweater. Gosling’s costume was handmade, customized from a mail-order pattern from the 1950s. If you want one, you have to knit it yourself.
That challenge has crafty fans of the film racing to source yarn and patterns, and share their progress on a DIY project that can take weeks or longer to complete.
Jaclyn Ziegler, a knitting and crochet creator in Phoenix who posts under the name Purls & Top Knots, got going on her “Hail Mary” project before even watching the movie because “the sweater was just everywhere.” She has since seen the film twice, including from the third row of a packed IMAX theater, where the huge screen helped her count stitches in the fox tail on Gosling’s costume. She typed the specs—“six stitches across, six rows down”—into her phone.
On Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, Ziegler shared her yarn-sourcing trips to Michaels and Hobby Lobby, and tested her stitch spacing in a “gauge swatch.” Guys bombarded her with requests to buy the sweater when she was done, including one who commented with his size (“between XL and XXL”). She explained that the cost would be absurd for a project she expects to spend three weeks on.
“I’ve even had a few people say they’ve asked their wives to make one for them,” says Ziegler.
The company behind the original sweater design, Mary Maxim, a fourth-generation, family-owned knitting and crochet supply company with about 100 employees, has scrambled to fill more than a thousand orders for its new “Project Hail Mary” knitting kit.
With the movie surpassing expectations to become Hollywood’s top-grossing release of the year, the aura around Gosling’s knitwear even has some people picking up needles for the first time.
In Des Moines, Iowa, Nicole Nayima is expecting about 20 participants in her Black Sheep Craft Shop’s first “knit along,” which will have the group toiling through their “Project” pieces together starting next week. Three of her sign-ups are new to knitting.
Celebrity knitter Tom Daley helped fuel the sweater buzz. He’s a former diver with five Olympic medals whose calm-down ritual of knitting helped jump-start his “Made With Love” craft and clothing company. He whipped up a version of Gosling’s costume as a paid promotion for the film.
Daley posted a minute-long video documenting a process that actually took him 30 hours to complete with “a super chunky merino wool blend yarn and 10 mm needles,” he says in an email, noting that he did it without an official pattern.
For the proudly nerdy subculture of crafting, it’s a spotlight moment that lines up with the themes of “Project Hail Mary.”
In the adaptation of a sci-fi novel by “The Martian” writer Andy Weir, Gosling’s reluctant hero is a maker, using science, hacks and the help of an alien made of rocks to defeat space microbes that are devouring stars, including Earth’s sun.
The character’s now-famous sweater barely made it into the film.
During a costume fitting for Gosling, the star (a sometimes knitter himself) spotted a vintage Canadian curling-style sweater that costume designer Glyn Dillon had bought at a London clothing fair. Its creamy drape would help connect Gosling’s solo astronaut to the life he left on Earth, “almost like a comfort blanket,” says the film’s other costume designer, David Crossman.
But the piece, made from a pattern that the Mary Maxim company has sold for 70 years, had a pair of snarling gray wolves on the front with blood-red footprints, which the film team deemed too ferocious for Gosling’s goofy hero.
Dillon redesigned the wolves into cute red foxes, but had just days before filming began to make the new cardigan and backup duplicates.
The costume heads called on some pro knitters who got the job done. Crossman declined to be more specific about these ringers, saying, “They’re very closely guarded secrets.”
Mary Maxim owner Mitch McPhedrain, whose great-grandparents founded the company in the 1930s, wasn’t fully prepared for the rush when the movie came out. The company, which has warehouses in Port Huron, Mich., and Paris, Ontario, quickly sold out of its “Project Hail Mary” knit kit and is now taking $90 preorders for its incoming supply of yarn.
The last decade has been challenging, says McPhedrain, 32, but as the longtime catalog business has shifted to e-commerce, it’s made headway by partnering with crafting influencers to promote Mary Maxim products. Now, “Project Hail
Mary” has tied the company to a cool moment for handmade knitwear. “I wish we would have ordered more stock ahead of time,” McPhedrain says. The executive did manage to secure one for himself—he’s posing in it as the model on the Mary Maxim web store.
Shared via PressReader
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Smart. Wild turkeys strutting their stuff during Easter Sunday.
seal pug
Nostr is a control plane protocol that is simple and correct.