Ruthless Knitting Archive

The first thing I ever knit was a sweater.

Well, okay, I practiced casting on, knitting and purling, and then frogging for a few days before I began the sweater. But the first knitted object I made was a sweater. Why not start with something smaller and less complicated? My reasoning was simple: What I wanted to have was a sweater, so why knit something else? I figured that if I tried to make my own sweater, I’d learn a lot of new skills, and if it didn’t work out, I could always rip it back and start over. Sound reasoning, right?

I used really great yarn for the project, which I selected at the wonderful Webster’s in Ashland, Oregon: Rowan’s Yorkshire Tweed Chunky in Pecan. More or less following a pattern in The Yarn Girls’ Guide to Simple Knits for a basic roll-neck, and using size 10.5 needles, I completed the sweater fairly quickly. For a first project, it came out very well. It fit my body, looked like a sweater, lacked gaping holes, and could be worn out in public. Here I am modeling it just after I completed it:

At first, I wore this sweater a lot. So much, in fact, that David felt it was necessary to impose a rule: the sweater could not be worn for more than two consecutive days. And he was right to do so. The rule was necessary to keep me from living in the sweater until it had to be cut off my body. In part, I wore it because I was proud of it, but mostly I put it on day after day because it was very warm and extremely comfortable, and I didn’t leave the apartment much anyway.

This was a few years ago. Last winter, the sweater got worn a little, but not nearly as often as it had the first year. And this year, I found that I wore it hardly at all. I was beginning to focus more on what was wrong with the sweater than what I liked about it.

The sweater’s flaws were few, but what they lacked in number they made up for in glaring obviousness:

1. It was too short.

2. It was too wide.

The picture above makes the sweater look cuter than it actually was, because I had just pressed the hell out of the bottom edge. It was supposed to be a rolled-up hem, and it eventually rolled to make the whole sweater about an inch shorter — and unevenly, so that it was shortest in the middle of the front.

Notice how I’m using the past tense? That’s because I have just finished transforming my first sweater into this:

I had been thinking for a while of ripping out the whole sweater and reknitting it. It seemed it would be a bit disrespectful to my first FO to treat it that way, but I knew I’d enjoy the new sweater more, and I didn’t want to waste the lovely Rowan yarn on something I was no longer interested in wearing. After some reflection, however, it occurred to me that maybe rather than reknit the sweater, I ought to transform it into a cardigan. This would preserve the original knitted pieces (more or less), which seemed more respectful, but would hopefully also turn the sweater into something I wanted to wear again.

I had already accomplished a similar transformation of my second-ever sweater, this one in Rowan Felted Tweed in ginger. I had some typical newbie knitter gauge issues with this sweater, and it came out much larger than I wanted, but still rather lovely — except for the button bands, which were a disaster. I worried at the time that I would somehow screw up knitted button bands with knit-in buttonholes and thought that I would get a much more professional result if I sewed on grosgrain ribbon and did machine-knit buttonholes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find very good directions anywhere about how to do this, and I didn’t take into account that the act of sewing would stretch out the front of the sweater. I ended up with button bands that were noticeably longer than the front of the sweater, and when I tried to block them back to the right length, the ribbon on the inside buckled, making the button bands lumpy and uneven on the front.

To make matters worse, I chose some wonderful green glass buttons for the sweater before I ever picked out the yarn, and I remained committed to them even though they didn’t really work with the color or style of the finished object. I ended up with this:

Several months ago, I decided to fix the Felted Tweed sweater as best I could by picking up and knitting new button bands and a new collar several inches outside the current ones, turning the excess fabric to the inside and cutting it off, and adding new buttons. The sweater was reborn as this:

Much better, right? And not just because my hair is slightly more presentable. (And no, I didn’t pose in the same place and wear the same shirt underneath over a year later on purpose. I just like that spot. And that shirt.)

With this success under my belt, I felt confident tackling a do-over of the Yorkshire Tweed sweater, and I’m very happy with the result. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely more wearable than it once was. It’s no longer too short, it’s only slightly too wide, and it has cute buttons and a floppy collar. While I’m not about to start wearing it all over town — the downside of the sweater knit with chunky yarn being that it tends to make one look chunky — it’s definitely been restored to a more high-profile place in my wardrobe. I feel that I’ve given my first sweater a new lease on life.

I considered posting a tutorial on how to turn a flawed sweater into a better one, but I wasn’t sure it would be much use. (Do other people have early sweaters that could use a face-lift, or was that just me?) Also, I didn’t take enough pictures to do a proper tutorial. Instead, I give you this.

Turning an Old Sweater into a New Cardigan in Ten Easy Steps

1. Remove the existing collar.

2. Find the center of the front and mark it with safety pins.

3. Decide how much fabric to either side of the center you want to remove and mark the cutting lines with safety pins. Keep in mind that the button bands you’ll be knitting on will take up some additional space, so unless you want the sweater to be wider, you’ll need to remove at least the width of a single button band. You can remove additional fabric to bring in the sweater’s silhouette a bit, but be careful in deciding how much, because if you take off too much, you’ll bring the armholes and side seams too far toward the front, screwing up the fit. It works for me to try the sweater on and decide while wearing it where the new button bands ought to go.

4. If you want to add ribbing or a decorative edging to lengthen the sweater, pick up the stitches and knit it on. You’ll pick up your first stitch one or two stitches in toward the center from where you intend to knit on the new button band, and you’ll likewise pick up your last stitch one or two stitches past where the other button band will go.

5. Cut up the center of the front.

6. Pick up and knit your collar and button bands. You can pick up stitches all the way up one side, around the collar, and down the other side and knit a round collar and button bands all in one go. Elizabeth Zimmerman describes how to do this in the Knitter’s Almanac, though her description is pretty spare. Or you can pick up and knit one button band, pick up and knit the other button band, and do the collar separately. This is the way to go if you want to have a more complicated collar. Some cardigan collars are knit upward from the body before the button bands are knit on, and some are added afterward. Make sure you know which you want before you begin either the button bands or the collar.

7. Working a stitch and a half or two stitches out from where you’ve picked up the button bands on each side, machine- or hand-sew a vertical line through each stitch in a column. Cut off the excess fabric outside of the sewing line. If you like, you can hand-sew ribbon over this edge, tacking it down to the inside of the sweater. I haven’t bothered.

8. If you want new cuffs, figure out how much of the old sleeves you want to keep, snip a stitch and unravel around, put the new stitches on your needles, and knit new cuffs downward.

9. Block.

10. Sew on buttons.

Voila! You’re done.

P.S. If any of you are concerned that I haven’t posted about Project Buster in a while, fear not: I’ve started seaming. We should have a finished object in a day or two.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Finished Objects, Reconstruction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.