Anyone who thrifts regularly has noticed that all of the sweaters have come out of hiding for fall and are ready to be chopped up for crafting. I guess it is the same in regular retail stores, but you wouldn’t want to buy a brand new sweater just to dismember it, now would you? A few weeks ago Colleen posted about how to felt sweaters, and last week I posted about knitting with previously knit sweater yarn, but what if you want to take a sweater’s fabric and make it into something else that looks hand knit?

That’s what I did here with Elise’s new “rainbow dress” because the knit fabric was serged together and couldn’t be unraveled into yarn. In order to keep the fabric from unraveling I used two tricks which can come in handy anytime you are cutting up knitted yarn fabrics. First, I wanted the skirt of the dress to look finished, so I threaded a life line into the fabric (great tutorial here) before cutting the fabric and then used a crochet hook to simulate a bind off.

For sewing the bodice I used a zigzag stitch, which grabs a few rows of knit and binds it all together to prevent unraveling, and lined the sweater knit fabric with t-shirt weight knit fabric, stitching the right sides together. Then I turned the fabric and top stitched the edges to make it have a nice finished look. I bound the arms and straps with coordinating bias tape and connected the bodice to the skirt with a zigzag stitch and added some buttons for embellishment. Isn’t it cute?!