Call me the Midnight Sweater Surgeon

The best ideas come in the middle of the night.

As you may recall, I made this Frelsi sweater last fall using a pair of sleeves my in-laws found in the “hoarder bus” that had been abandoned on their property. All I had to do was knit the body; however, something went wrong in the construction because the shoulders and armpits hit way too low. I couldn’t lift my arms an inch while wearing it.

It was hidden away in my “shame pile” and forgotten about for months until a late-night Reddit scroll gave me the epiphany I needed to fix it. Another Reddit user on r/knitting had also made a fair-isle sweater and was facing similar issues with immobility. Other users chimed in that perhaps the yoke was too long, causing the armholes to be placed lower than they should.

I shot out of bed and laid my ill-fitting sweater atop another sweater that fit appropriately, lining up its armholes with where the armholes should have been. The fact that my sleeves were finished separately and grafted on meant that it was simply a matter of picking apart the thread of yarn I’d used to sew the sleeves to the body. Then by lining up the newly-separated sleeves to their new position and reattaching the tops of the sleeve edges, I was able to shorten the yoke in a way that would make Victor Frankenstein proud. I then flipped the sweater inside out and cut off the excess flaps of material from the shoulders before patching the rest of the sleeve to the armpit, obsessively checking my work along the way.

I still have several bones to pick with Lopi yarn, as it pulled apart at several points during this process and while blocking at the end, but at least I was able to salvage the sweater to a degree where it’s actually functional.