frankensweater

i have three shelves of sweaters in my closet, which hold somewhere around 36 sweaters (holy crap, that's the first time i've done that math.....). anyway, i usually rotate between about 5 of them, because most of them are too short for my long torso---i can't deal with any mid-section flesh being uncovered, it just makes me cold all over. plus it just looks terrible.

so rather than just sending 30 sweaters packing to the salvation army, i thought i'd see if i could make some of them wearable.

so i started with these two lovelies, both recently given to me by wile's auntie meg and auntie syd:



i hacked them both in pieces horizontally, right below the bust-line...





...removing the sleeves of sweater #2 as well.

i then chopped the bottom edge off of sweater #2, and inserted the resulting tube o'sweater into the middle of sweater #1:



as you can see, i ended up with some wonky side seams, so i just sewed new ones a half inch inside the existing ones, which straightened things out and also made it fit better, yay.

i was pretty happy at this point, but bored with the neckline:



so i went at that with the scissors too....



i trimmed it with the ribbing that i cut off the bottom of sweater #2 (i don't have a close-up shot of that, but you'll see it in the finished shots at the end). this made things better. but i still wasn't thrilled...it still needed something, but i wasn't sure what...till i remembered a patch that i had from my friend's band, which had been lingering in my wallet since i had bought it at his last show. i grabbed it, and placed it on about six different places on the sweater, but none looked right.....hmmm....then it hit me: pocket! i created a little pocket out of the end of one of the hacked-off sleeves of sweater #2, and attached the patch to it with some fusible interfacing...



found a good place for it on the sweater...



...stitched it on, and voila!



two sweaters i probably never would have worn become one sweater i love very much.



p.s. this is what happens when you forget to turn you flash off when taking mirror pictures:



ooo, sparkly!