Way back when I picked up knitting again, I was surfing around some knitblogs and ran across the post of someone who was chopping up their knit sweaters. With scissors. On purpose.
I was perplexed and horrified. I mean, I had created some oddly shaped items, some items not fit for wearing outside of the house, and even some disasters that deserved to be frogged, but… chopped up? With scissors? On purpose? Plus, the knitting didn’t even look bad - it was some really pretty color work.
Ah, yes. I was such a knitting newbie. Looking back, I almost want to pat myself on the head and ruffle my hair and say, “Oh, to be so young and innocent again.”
I have since learned about steeks. And steeking. (I obviously haven’t learned if “steek” is a noun or verb, though). Basically, steeks are knit into fair isle sweaters so they can be knit in the round like a tube, and then the steeks are cut to form holes for the arms of the sweater to be sewn into.
After watching a pretty informative episode of Knitty Gritty about a year ago, I decided to try this out for myself. I promptly knit a body and two sleeves of a teddy bear sized sweater:
Then put it aside for almost a year.
A couple of weekends ago, I pulled it out of hibernation, and decided the time had come to chop up this sweater. On purpose.
First, I aligned the sleeves next to the sweater to measure how far down they went, so I could cut the steek the correct length. I marked along the cut line and the bottom edge with stitchmarkers:
Then, I set my sewing machine to the shortest stitch length, and sewed down an across the sweater body, about 2 knit stitches away from the center cut line. Here’s how it looks from the inside, which is much easier to see:
When both sides were secured, I cut down the middle of the “v” of the center stitch, down to just before the bottom sewing reinforcement:
On both sides:
It was necessary to shoo one of my wool-eating cats away when she got too nosy:
It really wasn’t as nerve-wracking as many people have made it out to be. Then again, this is a couple of days knitting on a teddy bear sweater. I’ll reserve judgement until I take scissors to an eleven color fair-isle sweater that took me 8 months to create.
After the chopping, it’s time to sew the sleeves on. For this sweater, first you sew the shoulder seems. Then, from the RIGHT side, insert the sleeve and stitch it in place:
By doing it this way, the raw edges are turned inside and locked down by the seaming:
Do that on both sides, and voila! Three pieces are now one complete mini-sweater:
“But Susan!” you’re saying. “This thing is a lumpy mess - you didn’t block it at all, did you? You didn’t fold the hems over and sew them down! And I bet you didn’t weave in any of the extra ends!”
You’re right, I didn’t. But once I finished sewing in both sleeves, I realized: No human or toy (or cat) is ever going to wear this sweater. This was created simply to learn how to cut steeks. It fulfilled its mission, and therefore I see no need to do the extra finishing.
Thus ends my adventure in steeking. In cutting steeks. Whichever. That’s one more FO off the list, and one more knitting skill to add to my list. Job well done.