Lobolita

Honestly, I don’t cut up all my knitting. In fact, this is only the second time I’ve ever done so. But since I had a sweater to cut up, a camera with a nifty macro setting, and a blog, I figured I might as well throw the process up here for the edification of anybody who might want to cut up their knitting, too.

Needless to say, Drops 97-24 is knitted. I’ll do a final project post with full-length photos and details later. For now, let’s rip into it.

The cast:
A tube-o-sweater
A small crochet hook. For this worsted weight sweater, I used size E.
Grabby yarn
Small, sharp scissors

For this sweater, I had a steek 5 stitches wide. This was probably too narrow; next time I’d do 7. I ran four rows of slip stitch crochet down the steek, two on each side of where I intended to cut. Instead of using the slippery Elann Devon, I used the grabbier Fisherman’s Wool so that the stitches would hang onto themselves. Here, you can see the process of putting slip stitches along a column of knit stitches. You want to choose a crochet hook small enough that your chain of crochet won’t stretch and distort the front edge of your cardigan once the steek is cut.

Here you can see the four columns of crochet, both in the colorwork yoke and the plain body of the sweater. I worked the two columns on each side toward the center. This will help the steek curl under nicely when it comes time to finish the edges.

Finally, I laid the sweater out on a flat surface with paper in between the front and the back so I didn’t accidentally cut anything I didn’t want to. Taking my scissors and proceeding very, very slowly, I liberated the left and right sides of the cardigan from each other.