This sweater was dying a silent death in my closet: I did no longer wear it because the silhouette didn’t suit me anymore and it no longer matched my current style. But because parting with handknits is hard, it kept on lingering in my drawer while I was undecided what to do with it. This week while getting my wardrobe ready for the colder weather, I finally took it out and had a good look at it. All of a sudden it clicked. Since the core of the sweater was still very usable and it technically still fitted me, I decided to perform some knit-surgery on it. Here’s what I did:

• I ripped out the hem and shortened it a significant amount. I decided to not decrease before reknitting the hem to give the sweater a boxy fit. With this intention I also chose to add a 2x2 ribbed split hem instead of the original 1x1 rib, and to not go down a needlesize for the ribbing so the hem would cinch in as little as possible.
• I did the same with the sleeve cuffs: made the sleeves shorter and replaced the cuffs with a 2x2 rib to match the hem. Here also no extra decreases and knitted with same needle size as sleeves for minimal cinching.
• I removed the ‘wings’ from the shoulders because they’re a bit too whimsical to my liking these days.

It still needs a thorough blocking because I did not steam the yarn before reknitting with it, which is visible in the resulting fabric. But I have good hopes that it will all work out fine. (Edit: it did.)

Conclusion:

• I’m so happy I decided to not entirely frog this sweater! It took me only a couple of hours to make these adaptions and I’m sure it will give me plenty more wears out of this garment.

• This is a reminder to always, always, always add needle sizes and yarn info to a project page in order to shorten/lengthen/adapt your handknits when they no longer suit you. Although I never knit a garment with the intention to modify it later, this proves that it definitely is possible to fall out of love with an older knit, while all they need is a little TLC to make them lovable again. Logging in all the info needed for this makes the process so much easier - because imagine I would have had to swatch to find out the fitting needle size… I’m sure I would never even have started this process!

• I regret not photographing the sweater properly before starting this process. I never took a full sized picture of this sweater (maybe this was a sign all along); so now I don’t have a good ‘before’ picture to show the metamorphosis it made.

• Yay for handknitting and being able to revisit your projects! If this would have been a store-bought sweater, I could not have done this and I would have had to part from it. Now I can enjoy my work again ànd it feels like there’s a brand new sweater in my wardrobe! So many wins!