August 14, 2006

REKNITTED

Every knitter has stuff in her closet that she hates. Lots of people rip those garments out and start over or move on to something else, but I just leave the loathed garment in my closet and wish a magic fairy would come make it all better for me. So far no luck.

Inspired by a Knitty Gritty episode, I have decided to fix some problem knits. The highest priority was the first cable sweater I ever did. I blindly followed the pattern and completed the entire sweater, only to find that the torso was about 5 inches too long for my liking. If it were the 80s, I could've thrown on a belt and made a mini-dress out of it. Sigh. I wore the sweater a couple of times out of obligation, but I never liked it.

So this past week I did the scariest knitting thing I've ever done: I cut the bottom off with scissors and knitted new ribbing on, eliminating several unwanted inches. Which meant picking up stitches out of cables. Yikes.

cablesweater.JPG

I don't know if you can really tell from this before and after photo how much length I lost, but it was quite a bit. I lost a little blood, sweat, and tears in the process too. But now I have a sweater that I will actually wear, instead of one that looks nice from a distance but never leaves the closet.

I told myself that I don't want to move on to new projects until I am happy with the ones I have. That means I've got about four or five sweaters to either rip out completely and salvage the yarn for something else, or to fix somehow. Probably rip out, in all honesty, for they're such a waste of yarn.

Off to tackle another monstrous garment...

Posted by Sarah at August 14, 2006 03:50 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Cool! Scissors on FO are freaky at first but your end results look great!

Posted by: zib at August 14, 2006 05:27 PM

The "revised" sweater looks great. I'll bet it was a lot less work that knitting a whole new sweater, especially with all those cables! Wear it with pride.

Posted by: Lou at August 14, 2006 08:29 PM

Taking scissors to knitting! Are you insane?
It was a mission without much chance of success,
but you carried it off. Well DONE.

Your husband can only HOPE to be half as brave!

Posted by: MaryIndiana at August 17, 2006 11:39 PM