Not until a decade later, while working at that most manly of undertakings — musical theater — at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn., did Mr. Bennett pick up needles again. This time he was hooked for good.

“The entire cast and crew knit, so I started again and I loved it,” he said.

He was good at it, too, so much so that within five years he found himself running several yarn stores in Greenwich Village; conducting seminars for passionate knitters in New York, Chicago and Seattle; writing patterns for Vogue Knitting; and obtaining a design degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology so he could take on commissions by high-end designers.

For the “Project Runway” winner, he created a spectacularly complicated Fair Isle sweater-coat with the traditional pattern worked as a pair of wings. For Mr. Bastian, he made, among other things, a capsule “Extra Man” collection styled after the clothes favored by preppy Upper East Siders; it was acquired by Saks and Bergdorf Goodman (whose customers apparently suffer no sticker shock when the hangtag on a cardigan reads $1,800).

Image Mr. Bennett's work.

“He can do anything,” Mr. Bastian said of Mr. Bennett, who executed a series of ’70s-inspired sweaters for his spring 2015 collection, whose overall theme is the Eagles and the Southwest. “He knits stuff like leather and rawhide,” Mr. Bastian added.

Leather and rawhide, as it turns out, is the least of it. By knitting turkey feathers into a sweater of Mr. Bastian’s design, Mr. Bennett is following a trend among knitters to challenge traditional limits of the craft, according to Mary Colucci, the executive director of the Craft Yarn Council, a trade group for the estimated 38 million home knitters in the United States.