After putting it off for quite a few weeks, I finally attempted to tackle the yarn chicken situation with my Pediment jumper project.
Help! I need to save my knitting project…
I have two problems with my current knitting project, and one of them is fairly major: I don’t have enough yarn to finish this jumper.
I am knitting a Pediment Sweater, one of my own knitwear designs. Pediment is a boxy, drop shoulder sweater, knit from the bottom up with wedges of moss stitch at either side of the body. I cast on a couple of months ago, choosing to size up from my usual for a big, slouchy, comfy hug of a jumper.
In the interests of said cosy handknit sweater, this was meant to have full-length sleeves, and unfortunately, it is quite clear that I’m not going to make it. To make things a little more complicated, the yarn I’m knitting with is a precious handspun - and some of the spinning fibre was limited edition - so there’s no possible way of getting any more.
Fortunately, I have a second knitting problem that offers the solution to the first! I knitted the body a bit too long. I knew I was going to be tight on yarn when I cast this knitting project on, but when working the body of the sweater, I got carried away knitting up the glorious handspun yarn and added quite a few extra centimetres. Now, normally, the extra length wouldn’t bother me, but in this case, I need that yarn for the sleeves to if I have any chance of finishing this knitting project successfully.
Could sweater surgery be the answer?
A couple of podcast episodes ago, I asked for advice on how to save my knitting project, and many of you suggested a solution I hadn’t even thought of: sweater surgery.
If a sweater is too long, the common thing would be to chop off the bottom and re-knit the ribbing. But since the Pediment Sweater has those lovely panels of moss stitch coming up from the hem, I don’t want to lose any of that detail.
So instead, the plan was to chop up my knitting, take a chunk out just below the arms and then graft the body back together again. The surgery line will fall across my bust, which could be quite obvious, but it’s the only way to reclaim enough yarn to finish my knitting project.
Attempting sweater surgery to save my knitting project
Now, I’ve never attempted sweater surgery before, so please don’t take this as a knitting tutorial for how to do sweater surgery, but I recorded the process to take you along for the ride.
Here’s what I did:
1. Marked where to cut my knitting project
Before picking up scissors, I marked the round where I needed to begin unpicking using a stitch marker. I placed it a couple of rows above where the wedge of moss stitch ended, so I didn’t accidentally unravel into the patterned section and create a messy yarn based chaos.
2. Set up to unravel
Once I knew where the cut needed to be, I made a small snip and started unravelling the first row. I had two cables set up, each with a needle on one end and a stopper on the other, ready to pick up the live stitches: one for the front and one for the back. Once I’d finished ripping the yarn out, I would then be able to graft my handknit sweater back together.
3. Picked up stitches before the big reclaim
I successfully unravelled the first round, picking up the live stitches from the row above and making sure they all faced the right direction for as invisible a graft as possible. Thankfully, my handspun yarn is woolly enough that I could undo a few stitches at a time and then scoop them up easily. At the same time, it’s a smooth worsted-spun yarn, so it wasn’t too sticky for unravelling.
Whilst this process itself wasn’t difficult, pulling the ever-growing tail of yarn through every stitch did become increasingly tedious!
4. Reclaimed my handspun yarn
Because I chose a slightly inconsistent handspun yarn to knit my Pediment jumper, I alternated between two balls of yarn when knitting to distribute the colours nicely. Fine when knitting, a little more faffy when unravelling.
I wound one strand onto a niddy noddy (a sort of wooden knitting tool for winding yarn into a hank) and the other into a ball. The idea was to straighten out the yarn and relax the kinks as I didn’t want to be knitting with noodles. Once the first hank was done, I wound the ball onto the niddy noddy as well.
The first row was a little sticky (and not remotely as satisfying as I had hoped it would be), but thankfully, once I got going, the remaining reclaim went rather smoothly. When I reached my stitch marker, I unravelled the final round and prepared to transfer the stitches onto my second needle.
At this point, I was bored with sweater surgery for one evening and decided the rest would be better saved for another day!
5. Picked up my stitches before the big graft
After a couple of days' respite from sweater surgery, I was back with renewed enthusiasm for yarn nonsense. I unravelled the final row from the lower section of the sweater and picked up those stitches with a slightly smaller needle than the one I used to knit the garment.
I’m using 3.75mm needles for my Pediment sweater, so I used a 3.25mm needle to pick up stitches. This would give me a little more room for manoeuvre during grafting, helping the handspun yarn pass through more easily and preventing any unnecessary abrasion on the stitches and yarn - something I was prioritising as much as possible.
6. Grafted my handknit sweater back together again
Grafting felt like it took approximately forever.
I’m not going to pretend that I just grafted off the top of my head, either. Although I do it fairly often, I always look up how to set up my stitches and follow along until I get into the flow of it. I followed this Kitchener stitch tutorial from Purl Soho, just in case you ever need help with seamless grafting in knitting.
I swapped the needle and end cap around so that I was working in the correct direction and then began the eternal graft… All in all, it took about 2 hours. Which is a while.
When I got to the last eight stitches, I realised I only had about four stitches on the bottom. After a moment of panic and an enforced break, I came back with fresh eyes and realised I had just missed a couple of stitches when I was picking up the stitches of the top section. So I went back and undid those, and I think it worked out!
I’m certain there is still somewhere at the back where things are a bit misaligned, but I can’t find it. And thankfully, the nature of the handspun yarn means my knitted sweater is busy enough that I don’t think anyone will ever notice!
7. Tried my rescued handknit sweater on
After a quick steam block, I tried my rescued sweater on to see how it fits. Bearing in mind the way this fits at the moment is going to be very different to how it fits in a few months, thanks to growing a human, but I think it looks good. It’s a bit cropped, so right now it hits at a hilarious point on the bump, but I think it’s going to be really comfy, and I’m really happy with it. So far, sweater surgery did what I needed it to!
Sweater surgery saved my knitting project
This was my first attempt at sweater surgery on a handknit garment, and while it was tedious, I think I have saved my jumper project. We’ll see how much more sleeve I can get out of the yarn I have salvaged, but since I am knitting them two at a time, this will be far easier to manage. I’m just so pleased I didn’t have to frog my entire knitting project to save it - joy!
I’d love to hear from you, though. Have you ever done sweater surgery on your handknits before? Have you been successful? Have you considered it but chickened out? Please do share your experiences of it, because it didn't even occur to me to do surgery on this until a few people suggested it. And now that I've done it, it was absolutely the right answer to my knitting problem!
If you’d like to see how my Pediment sweater turns out, I’d love you to subscribe to the podcast. I am hoping to be casting off within the next couple of weeks, so maybe I’ll be able to show you in my next podcast episode.
I’ll see you then!
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