WIP Wednesday: Sweater Surgery

Well after letting this cursed sweater sit and think about what it's done for a month, and after finishing the other timed gifts I was making, I decided to finally attack this until I win. It will not defeat me!

 

I put the sweater on after finishing everything except the finishing touch of backing the button bands only to discover the rather unfortunate length the sleeves turned out.

You may ask, "How can a sleeve be both too long AND too short?" Well, my friends, this is how. It's too short to look like a long sleeve, but also too long to be 3/4 sleeve, and also it's too loose fitting at the cuff to slide them up to a length I would like. Ugh. I started unpicking the sleeve cuff a month ago only to realize that they were knit from the bottom up, creating a whole different problem than I've ever dealt with before. I was lucky enough to find this video by Roxanne Richardson that shows how to fix this in detail. After watching it a few times, I had the courage to *gulp* cut my knitting...

First you insert a lifeline just above where you want to rip back to - I used a slightly smaller circular needle and picked up the stitches along an entire row. Next, you go at least one row beneath that so you can have a tail to weave in...

And you SNIP! AAaaahhhh....

I had to unpick each stitch along that row one by one, but once I unraveled that part, the pieces were separated and I could just pull the bottom of the sleeve and wind it into a ball. I did steam the ball with my iron to get a bit of the kinking out of the yarn and now I am in the process of re-knitting the cuff. I'm going to go down a needle size this time to help tighten up the ribbing. If this works well, I will then repeat for the other sleeve.

The real irony is everything I went through with not having enough yarn to finish the button bands - which I talked about here. Depending on how much yarn I have leftover after this surgery, I may go back and redo the button bands in the original yarn. Ah well. This sweater is just determined to cause problems, but I will triumph eventually! Everyone think good thoughts for me :)