Fun Ways to Make Over Old Sweaters

While you’re busy knitting yourself a new sweater, you might start to think that your old sweaters aren’t looking so great. Maybe you’ve juts worn the same ones for years and would rather see a different look, or maybe there’s a stain or a hole in a noticeable spot that you want to patch or cover up so that you can continue to wear the sweater. Hooray for making do!

Apartment Therapy has a great round up of options for remaking sweaters.

The good news is if you know a little duplicate stitch or cross stitch you can easily cover a hole or a stain or just give a sweater a completely different look without a whole lot of effort. What could be better than that?

It’s also a great way to make a store bought sweater look more unique, until you get to where your wardrobe only has handknit sweaters in it. (That will happen someday, right?)

[Photo from Karen Barbé via Apartment Therapy.]

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I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve shared any patterns for our circular knitting machine users. I know these devices aren’t for everyone but even though I much prefer knitting by hand, it is kind of fun to crank things out on these machines.

One of the most common early projects for a circular knitting machine is a scarf. Which makes sense, because it’s just one long tube and you can make it as long as you like.

One problem that comes from knitting scarves on the circular knitting machine, though, is that it can be hard to know how to finish the ends of the tube so that it looks like a finished scarf and not a tube of knitting.

If you’re not a knitter or crocheter, the most basic way to finish a circular knitting machine scarf is just by cinching up the ends and maybe adding a pompom to each end to cover up any hole that might still be visible at the end.

But if you have a little knitting or crochet skill or are willing to learn, there are a lot of different options for closing up the ends of a scarf. And this would also be true if you hand knit a tube scarf!

I recently wrote a post over at Our Daily Craft that includes five different ways to close up the ends of a tube scarf:

the simple cinching method mentioned above
sewing the stitches together
three needle bind off
grafting
crochet bind off

Grafting is my favorite because I feel like it gives the cleanest, closest to a seamless look. If you’re a knitter you may already know how to do it but even if you don’t it’s not that hard to learn.

Do you knit tube scarves by hand or machine? I’d love to know how you like to finish them!

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