Project 42: Side opening cardigan from a slightly shrunken sweater

It’s hard these days to find a sweater that will shrink and felt. (If you have a shrunken sweater that you don’t want, I’d love to have it!) Not enough wool content if any in most store bought sweaters to give a nice felted fabric that is a great starting material for making mittens for instance. I tried to shrink this sweater, but it didn’t do much. I chopped it up into another shape instead. (This is a Nancy H-P hand-me-down.)

On Pinterest, I found an interesting sweater  (that is available as a free knitting pattern on Ravelry) and got my scissors out and started to cut up the sweater. I sewed lycra binding around the edges, and added some buttons. For sleeves, I shortened them and sewed a hem with opening for a strip of lycra loop to gather the sleeves. The extra fabric from the sleeves was used to lengthen the sweater by an couple of inches. I had a bit of trouble with feeding the sweater fabric without stretching when sewing, but all in all, the seams turned out not too wonky.