Shortening a sweater

I have this lovely fair-isle style sweater that I’ve wanted to shorten. It’s tunic length, and just doesn’t look right with my usual jeans and such. It looked nice when I was teaching, over a short wool skirt, but that’s about it.

With the help of some fearlessness and some websites, I decided to go ahead and do it.

Here’s the original sweater; the one with me in it is from 1997, and that’s my mother-in-law (who gave me the sweater) next to me.

First step was to decide how short I wanted to make the sweater. First of all I had to pick rows with just one color, since I’ve never done any colorwork. The wide fair-isle patterns also limited my choices; I decided to cut off the bottom two patterns. You see that it’s got a nice decorative hem, which I wanted to save and reattach. So, with yarn needle and waste yarn I made two lifelines — essentially catching all the stitches in one row where I planned to shorten the sweater, and in another row where I planned to cut off the hem. I also had to open the side seams up a bit past the point where the upper lifeline was.

Next, a little cut in the row just under the upper lifeline, and unraveling all that middle section between the two lifelines. That pile of leftovers is tempting, but I’m not sure yet what I want to make with it.

Next, transferring the stitches from the lifelines onto two knitting needles, and positioning them for kitchener stitch (grafting).

To do kitchener, there’s a preliminary step, then four steps you repeat over and over, then a finishing step. Here are some pictures of the four repeated steps. I found that it’s nowhere near as complicated as some instructions make it seem. And yes, it’s easiest to graft fairly loosely for several stitches, then tighten to gauge with a crochet hook.

Step 1; after step 1;
Step 2; after step 2;
Step 3; step 4.

I did run into some complications.

First of all, the upper lifeline had more stitches than the hem lifeline. Kitchener requires equal numbers of stitches. My solution was to “graft two together” — like knitting or purling two together. I did this on the back needle, which held the greater number of stitches — on step 4 of one cycle I’d slip the yarn knitwise through two stitches, then on step 3 of the next cycle I’d slip the yarn purlwise through the same two stitches and slide them off the needle. It leaves little slanted bumps like a k2tog, but distributing them evenly makes it look okay, especially with such tiny stitches as this sweater has.

Secondly, perhaps because the colorwork knots unraveled or something, the side edges were not straight, and therefore the new side seams are a bit wonky. Again, not terribly noticeable with this sweater.

And here it is!