Nancy Drew holds a special place in my heart.
The world at large may recognize Nancy Drew as the auburn-haired teen detective from a series of children’s novels, with a legacy that stretches back to 1930 when the first book was published under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene (yes, sadly all of the Nancy Drew books are ghostwritten by several authors and Carolyn Keene never existed).
While I was absolutely a huge fan of the books, I know Nancy Drew best as the star of point-and-click mystery games. In November 2023, the Nancy Drew PC game series celebrates its 25th anniversary.
This series was a staple of my childhood. Like many during the pandemic, I started revisiting the media of my youth for that sweet, sweet hit of nostalgia. Since there were a whopping 33 games released from 1998 to 2019, I had a lot to keep me occupied!
Ever since I got big into knitting, I’ve started looking at sweaters through an almost forensic lens. I see a sweater someone’s wearing — either in person or onscreen — and I immediately start trying to dissect it and figure out how it was made. The Nancy Drew games have been no different.
The longer I played these games, the deeper my urge to recreate the sweaters from them grew, until I was overwhelmed with the options. So I took to my Instagram and created a series of polls alongside photos of the characters I was torn between.
The next day, after 26 votes across seven characters, the clear winner with 30% of the vote was Bill Kessler from the 16th game in the series, The White Wolf of Icicle Creek. Seen here in a cream-coloured cable cardigan:
I searched Ravelry high and low for a cabled grandpa-style cardigan with a shawl collar, but alas I couldn’t find one with the same cable pattern as my reference. So, in a similar vein to my Freddy Krueger sweater, I opted for a simple cardigan with the silhouette I needed, to use as my blank canvas.
My search then turned up Tin Can Knits’ Gramps Cardigan, a unisex cardigan with a slightly oversized design for maximum coziness. I picked out the wonderfully soft and squishy Cascade 220, a worsted-weight Peruvian Highland wool yarn, from Under The Elm, a mobile yarn store.
My next step was to figure out the cable situation, and how to place them on the cardigan. I scoured the internet for cable designs to figure out the closest possible configuration. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek came out in 2007, and its graphics are a reflection of the time. This was back when the Nancy games didn’t come in any higher resolution than 800×600 pixels, a diminutive screen size compared to the high-res games of today. So trying to compare the render to real-life samples of cable knitting was a challenge.
Among the dozens of cable patterns I sifted through, I landed on a three-piece braided cable for the two large sections on either side of the button band, and a 4×4 basic cable stitch on the sleeves and outer edges.
With this major modification in mind, I wanted to test my method before I started knitting in full. The Gramps cardigan is knit from the top down, increasing in size from the neckline out. So I did something I almost never do: I knit a swatch.
Swatching is the practice of knitting a sample, usually a flat square, to test the techniques, your yarn choices, and/or your needles to check the suitability for the project. So far, I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t had to rely very heavily on swatching, I usually hope for the best and live with the consequences if it’s not exactly perfect.
But for this project, I wanted to use a swatch to determine where my cables should go, especially in relation to the increases. So I worked up my swatch based on the front panels and working backwards, knitting from the ribbing upwards and doing decreases in place of the increases. This helped me visualize how the cables would take shape as the rows widened and space became available for them.
The end result is better than I ever could have hoped. Soft, thick, and very warm — a perfect impenetrable layer to protect me from the brutal Alberta cold this winter. The Peruvian Highland wool is slightly sheepy-smelling as well, which is comforting in a way. It’s like I’m getting hugged by an ewe. For the buttons, I found these beautiful clay ones at my local yarn store. Terracotta underneath and a glazed painted brown on top.
The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is the only Nancy Drew game set in Canada — my home province of Alberta at that. In it, Nancy is tasked with going undercover as the maid and cook of a lodge hotel in the Rocky Mountains to investigate the string of incidents plaguing it, while uncovering the truth about a lone white wolf that’s been stalking the grounds. Bill Kessler is one of the guests, who despite being ‘from Toronto’ is voiced with a goofy stereotypical Canadian accent that would rival Bob and Doug McKenzie. He’s almost always sitting in the common area of the lodge, playing a checkers-like tabletop game called Fox and Geese.
I was about 12 when I first played this particular game, but I never finished it, as my copy was corrupted and would constantly freeze and crash. I didn’t actually beat the game until this year. Having completed it as an adult, I think it’s better that it happened this way, especially with the advent of YouTube walkthroughs. Young me probably would have had a DEFCON 1-level fit over being required to beat Bill in four dreadful runs of Fox and Geese in a row without a visual aid to help me cheat the system. It’s a lot of players’ least favourite parts of the game.
Honestly, The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is a very middle-of-the-pack (pun intended) game. If I were choosing the project based on the games alone and not the sweaters as separate entities, I don’t know if this one would have been in the running. Some Nancy Drew games are notorious for feeling like chore simulators, and White Wolf is definitely one of them, where the mystery at times comes to a screeching halt to fulfill your kitchen or housekeeping duties. You could even go the entire game without talking to the actual culprit at all until the end.
Despite these nitpicks, I do like the overall vibe of White Wolf, the intertwining of historical elements with the modern-day storyline, and references to characters from previous games. I do feel a strange sense of pride that the one and only Canadian Nancy Drew game is set where I’m from. It may not be my favourite game of the bunch, but it’s still fun!
I could, and probably will, go on and on about the Nancy Drew series and the impact it has made on me. I’ve surely opened a Pandora’s box of potential, now that I’ve made one Nancy Drew sweater, I must make more!
And for those curious, here are the runners-up from the polls:
I love your very descriptive narrative that takes a winding historical route and intertwines with your final project. It gives a fullness and connection to the sweater that makes it more than just a “cable knit sweater”. You are very talented in your knitting and your writing! <3