Runs With Needles: Frustration

Runs With Needles

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Frustration

I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent woman. I have a job. I own a house. I keep five animals happy and healthy. I keep my plants one plant alive. I can handle basic car maintenance.

However, I cannot unravel a sweater.

On Thursday night I sat down for my three hours of TV (Survivor, Apprentice, ER) with this:



These are all the sweaters that I don't wear anymore. Look at all that free yarn! It's just cotton and acrylic, but it's all free. :-)

I sat down with a printout of the sweater-unraveling tutorial and got to work.

Three hours later, I was very frustrated and feeling like I shouldn't be allowed to live alone.

I couldn't get one sweater to unravel. Not one. Ugh!!

I ended up with this:



Why won't this unravel? Here's some closeups:



Here's the collar that I can't get to unravel:



To those of you who unravel sweaters, what am I doing wrong?

posted by Kathy at 4/16/2005 04:45:00 PM

3 comment(s):

The first thing you have to do is to get rid of the collar - take a close look (with a magnifying glass if necessary) and see if you can find a chain stitch holding it on the inside. If you can find where it starts all well and good, otherwise, clip one of the loops and very carefully lift the next loop off it. This will give you an end to pull and it should unzip. If all else fails, resign yourself to some short lengths of yarn and cut the collar off. If you do the latter, you'll have to pull out yarn strands until you get past the cut and then it should unravel. My first one was a bit difficult, but since then I know what to look for and they've been going ok. There was one expensive sweater that was sewn together with dyed to match sport weight yarn - that one was a bear and I had to resort to my lighted magnifier to get the seams out.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 16, 2005 5:05 PM  

Heyy. Very adorable site.. Your knitting is really pretty and I like the dog..

<33

By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 16, 2005 6:43 PM  

Alot depends on the sweater and how it is seamed. If its seamed well - then you just look for the one thread for each seam and pull. If its seamed badly (usually a machine knit type seam) then you may be forced to cut off the collar and maybe even the lower few rows of the sweater. You'll still have alot of yarn but you will have to tediously pull out the cut yarn strands. Its worth it in the end though - free yarn! You can do it!

By Anonymous Anonymous, at April 18, 2005 7:01 PM  

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