Tuesday 12 May 2015

When you knit your sleeves too short...

I am still in love with my owl jumper, and Kate Davies new book Yokes is firmly on my wish list.  However, as I mentioned in my post I knitted the sleeves a bit too short.  This wasn't enough to stop me wearing it but it did bug me. I have long monkey arms and I often find RTW tops are too short so I couldn't believe I'd made this mistake when knitting my own jumper!
However when I was in France my lovely Tante Odile (salut Odile) told me that it was possible to unpick from the middle of the arm and knit down. This was a total revelation to me. I don't know if it's because I'm not a very experienced knitter that it did not occur to me that this was a possibility, did you guys know this? However, I was very happy and Odile even gave me a quick lesson on how to do it. 

Because I found this so revelatory and useful I thought I'd share a tutorial with you all.  Let's ignore the fact that it's now spring and hopefully the need for wooly jumpers has passed for a while.
So pull a bit of yarn from the middle of a stitch-you're about to terrify yourself by cutting into your beautiful knit jumper but first you need to insert your circular needle or dpns into that row of stitching (sorry I didn't get a photo of that stage). Then cut through the tread you've pulled out and unravel-this bit is so terrifying, I did ask myself why I was risking ruining my jumper.
It would be a lot more difficult to do this (certainly beyond my current knitting abilities) if there was a pattern knitted into this bit of the jumper but in this particular case it was just a simple knit stitch.

You'll be left with a bit of cuff which you can frog and reuse.

And the sleeve with your dpns/circular needle which you can just knit to your desired length (don't forget to do the ribbing)

Just to show how much I added! This picture shows one sleeve that has been extended and one that has just had the ribbing removed. Isn't that a crazy difference?

And look, it's not even like they're super long now. Told you I had monkey arms! The whole jumper just feels so much more comfortable to wear now, I'm so pleased with it.

Another giants causeway snap. I swear I am going to do a better post about this soon.

Did you know about this tip? Very useful for those with little ones who become more gangly or for those of you like me who have monkey arms and for some reason don't process this before knitting up a jumper. 

1 comment:

  1. That's very clever and a great fix. I've got long arms too and too-short sleeves are very irritating!

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