Sweater surgery
It’s never fun when you run out of yarn on a knitting project, but when it’s a bottom up sweater, it’s especially frustrating! The easiest solution would be to finish your project with a different yarn, but what if you don’t want to? Well, you can always perform surgery on your sweater! Join me as I fix my own sweater by doing just that.
The sweater I’m working on is the Tjukk Haust by Skeindeer Knits, which is knit from the bottom up. I ran out of yarn with less than twelve rounds to go on the yoke, but I didn’t want to substitute with another colour. Instead, I chose to shorten the sleeves to three quarter length.
To do this, I first measured both the sleeve and my arm to see where I wanted the cuff to end. Once I knew this, I chose the point on the sleeve where I wanted the new cuff to start and marked this point on both sleeves.
Once I had done this (and measured twice and counted my rows to make sure I had marked the same row on both sleeves), I picked up the stitches for this row by sliding my needle underneath the second leg of each V.
After I had picked up all of the stitches, I cut one leg of a stitch on the row above where I picked up.
With a darning needle, I carefully unpicked this row of stitches.
That’s the bottom of my sleeve cut off! I then unraveled this piece and used the yarn to knit the cuff down.
Once I had done this for both of the sleeves, I had just enough yarn left to finish the rest of my sweater.
This is one way to adjust length on a piece you’ve already knit. I hope this has been helpful!
