Sunday, August 30

the deconstruction of a sweater!

this was actually a pretty nice sweater, but about 10 sizes too big. it was $2.99 at the goodwill and made of 100% beautiful chocolate brown lambswool. thrift stores can be an excellent source of great wools and cottons if you are willing to look for them. so i decided to take it apart! i washed it first to get the thrift store smell out. the next step is taking apart all the seams. usually a sweater will have side seams and sleeve seams and if there is collar or button band then those are the first ones that need to come undone.

depending on how the sweater was knit, there is usually a bind off row at the top of each piece that you have to undo before you can complete the fun task of just pulling on the string and watching it unravel. (for this sweater there was no bind off row, so it just fell apart after i pulled the seams out).
and in the end i got about 1200 yards of beautiful wool to recreate into something else!!!
i do have plans for this wool, but i haven't started on them yet, i will keep you all posted!

2 comments:

Megan said...

WOW!!!! Thanks so much for the tutorial! I'm soooooo impressed, and it looks so doable, I need to try it now! I'll be scouting out good sweathers now! (That really is a cute sweater, too bad it was too big, but not really because the yarn is great too! The bigger the better when you're harvesting the yarn!)

Kate said...

oooh, great find! What a beautiful chocolate color too... leave it to you to buy a beautiful sweater like that just to take it apart! On a thrifty thrifting and reconstruction note, I found a cute hoodie at DI the other day for 3$ and it was a size XXL, so I bought it and took in all the seams and it is SO cute now! I love it! love you Jes, I miss our project days! :)