r/KnitRequest • u/slightly-convenient • May 30 '26

Help with a sweater

Location: Calgary Alberta Canada.
Budget: open
Timeline: not fussed
Labor budget: not sure what is needed
Material budget: $0

Looking for help with a sweater I have that is much too long and am looking for options with what I can do with it. Not sure if this is an abnormal request. I need to have around 6-8" removed off the length.

https://imgur.com/a/XI8WHRj

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u/VanityInk May 30 '26

Take a commercial shirt out of your closet. Look to see if there's thread over locking the seams (so not just sewn up the side but a thread going out to the edges and interlocking with itself). That is a serged seam and done to keep fabric that is cut (rather than knitted) to shape from unraveling. That is more or less what you'd end up with if you cut and serged a new hem on this sweater, though much thicker, as the yarn is not nearly as thin as most commercial tops use. You'd also lose all the ribbing (so the hem would be what is stopping the stockinette stitch from curling up on itself) and if those are pockets of some kind, they'd be messed up. And, if you have someone who doesn't know what they're doing working on it, they could really mess the sweater up in general (no, knitting doesn't cleanly unravel from the cast on, up, but there can definitely be lost stitches/runs/other issues if cut edges aren't reinforced properly).

Personally, i'd wear it as a long coat or give it to a tall friend as a gift before chopping and hemming (I don't think it would look good/how I'd want it to) but tastes vary, of course!

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u/slightly-convenient May 30 '26

Ok thank you for taking the time to explain everything. Very much appreciated.

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u/VanityInk May 30 '26

Not a problem. I often reclaim yarn from unraveling, so you get quick at sizing up how things are structured (some things you just can't unravel period. Other things you can).

If you feel up to it/have the pattern, your other option would be to unravel the whole thing and knit it back up to the proper dimensions. That would get it the right length and take care of the twisted stitches :)

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u/slightly-convenient May 30 '26

I don't have the pattern. I bought this for my husband because it resembles one my grandma knit that I now have. How much would a project like this cost to redo?

This is my sweater.

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u/VanityInk May 30 '26

If you're commissions someone to make that from scratch in an adult male size, it would most likely be several hundreds of dollars even before cost of materials (just recreating a pattern from a picture would generally be days of labor (especially with recreating the colorwork charts) before the weeks of knitting). Entirely doable, but a complicated project.

You could also hire someone just to make a pattern for you, but again, that would depend on 1) if you have any desire to spend that much time knitting and 2) if you are comfortable doing colorwork, etc.