Pink Cashmere

Earlier this month, we had a yard sale.  The whole Fishhawk Ranch community had one.  So you can put your stuff out, sell some of it, and then go around and buy other people's stuff.  Ha.

Anyway, Vince always goes around and I don't.  This time, my friend Cathy came over and we worked the yard sale for several hours, then put Vince in charge for a bit.

We went to one where I bought a pretty pink Anne Klein 100% cashmere sweater for $2.  I later saw that the back of the lower arm had a tiny food stain on it.  No big deal, the sleeves were too long (as usual) so I wanted to try shortening them.  This is going to be called my:

"$2 Experiment"

I read that this is possible, but have not officially tried it myself.  I am going to attempt to unravel the sweater sleeve and pick-up the live stitches on my straight knitting needles and knitting with the unraveled yarn, a new edging.  I tried it on to see how long the sleeves really were.

It was / still is a pretty sweater:

I first measured the sleeve length and figured I would want it about 7" shorter.

I then opened the sleeve at the seam.  I then made a cut a little lower than where I wanted the new edging to be.  I cut one strand along the edging.  I held my breath; I really didn't know what I was doing.  And then to be doing it on a nice cashmere sweater.  I must be nuts!

The one cut allowed be to unhook this end of the strand from each loop by pulling gently at each stitch until I made it across the row.  The bottom of the sleeve has been separated from the rest of the sweater.

In the above pic, I have already started to unwind the lower portion of the sleeve and ball it up.  Yes, that ball of yarn is the bottom portion of the sleeve.  Cool, huh?

That pic also shows the rest of the sleeve, if you look closely, you can see the loops of the live stitches.  These are the loops that I will pick-up on my straight needles.  I chose a size 2 needle, because this was a fine knit sweater, so I estimated the needle size.

The live loops have been picked-up.  This was not as bad as I thought it would be; the stitches stayed open so I could easily insert the tip of the needle through them.  I made sure that the strand that I took out was near the last stitch I picked-up.  I need that to make sure I'm on the correct side. 

I then took that ball of yarn that I wound from the bottom portion of the sweater and did 1 purl row and then 3 rows of k1, p1 ribbing edge.  I then bound off.

I seamed the sleeve back up and it was done!  

It worked!

I was so stoked that I did not ruin the sweater.  I was getting nervous while I was unraveling that first row to separate the sleeve from the sweater.  I repeated this for the other sleeve.

I now have two small balls of cashmere yarn to do with as I please.  How nice!

Here is me modeling how lovely this sweater fits now.

I have another sweater to do this with.  I bought that a while back and now feel the confidence to go ahead an try this technique on it.  Another set of close-ups of the sleeve edging.

I love it!  I'm going to do this to everything now.  A long sleeve will not prevent me from buying a garment now.  Awesome!