I cut apart my sweater to fix the yoke
Sharing some pictures of the recent sweater surgery I did to Caitlin Hunter’s Zweig in case one of you needs the inspiration like I did. Sorry in advance: my pictures are not amazing and this is not a tutorial, just my long story.
I made this for a friend in CO and just really super-duper botched the tension on the triangles. It was okay until I finished the lace. Then the pucker showed up. No way I was going to rip back all of that lace (the first I’d ever knit) so I kept going, especially since everyone told me it would probably be fine after blocking.
[ Voice over: But it was not.]
I finished the whole damn sweater and decided I could not live with sending it to my bestie like this:
From far away it's not shockingly obvious that the tension is way too tight at the top, but it's not GOOD either. Compared to the colorwork past the lace, the triangles look washed out and faded. Nope nope nopity nope!
Close up you can see why the colors just don’t look as rich. The stitches are pulled so tight that you can see the white floats behind the purple triangles and too much gap in the white stitches making them shadowy instead of bright. I also used the Philosopher’s Wool technique to make this portion of the fabric completely woven (no floats) which exaggerated the poor tension, I think. (Disclaimer: I’ve also used Philosopher’s Wool technique to work wonders- with proper tension... Also, that woman’s enthusiasm is so contagious. I just love her so much.)
So! I looked online for how to cut out the middle of a sweater and then graft it back together. I had some trouble finding exactly what I wanted- I think most people are either experienced enough to notice the bad tension sooner than I did (I've been knitting less than a year) or most people aren't masochistic enough to do this to themselves with a finished project. #whyamilikethis
2 sets of circular needles and cables (or waste yarn for holding stitches)
Pattern (this doesn't work on rows with shaping- I had to pick up the row right before all of my m1 increases)
Picked up the stitches I intended to keep:
Cut the leg of one stitch somewhere a couple inches before the BOR I was keeping: gives me enough of a tail to weave in later #snipsnipMF
Then I used a tapestry needle to start unraveling the stitches that needed fixing. I wanted to keep some of this yarn for the kitchener stitch at the end, otherwise I would have just cut once at the top and once at the bottom to remove the entire section at once and saved myself some time.
Rejoined yarn to the neck and reknit the upper-most colorwork. At this point I am thinking, “Wow! This is going so much faster than I expected.” Like, 3 hours max to accomplish everything up to here.
Here are the triangles reknit without Philosopher's Wool technique (couldn’t be bothered, I was in a hurry) and ready to be grafted back on with kitchener stitch:
Grafted back together with the kitchener. Remember how surprised I was that this wasn’t taking longer? IT TOOK ALMOST 3 HOURS JUST TO PUT THIS THING BACK TOGETHER. Granted, I’ve never used the kitchener before and decided to try on a fingering weight PULLOVER. #ialmostdied At this point, the bottom row of the white triangles is a hot mess. Some stitches look like they are there on purpose and others look like they've been cannibalized by the sweater:
The yarn I salvaged earlier was still kinked and wavy in the guage I need for this section of the sweater. I tried to use that as a guide while sewing the kitchener, but it was even better when I used a tapestry needle and adjusted every single stitch around from beginning to end. #analretentivelevelpretistige You know the drill- tug one leg and pull the slack into another. I removed a couple of inches of inconsistency from my kitchener work and it shows:
Hey hey! How about that? The color of my triangles looks bolder than it did before and their shapes are more consistent/less squishy and blobby. Or at least iiiiiiii can tell the difference. (Certain familial relations just kept telling me it looked fine before. Lies and delusions.) I wouldn’t say that it’s perfect now, but honestly this extra bit of work made me feel excited about sending it to my bestie instead of cringey, which was what I felt every time I looked at it before.
The two tutorials that really helped me work up the courage to do this are:
Grafting 911 - How to save your knitting with kitchener stitch
How to Add Length to a Knit Sweater
I hope somebody finds this helpful. That second tutorial popped up in my feed right when I needed it to and so I took the plunge. 100% worth learning.
