As you can tell I’ve been on a knitting kick. My temptation is to go get super wonderful, and expensive, yarn so that I can knit and knit and knit. But that’s not how I like to craft and honestly I can’t afford it. So I’ve been working on a way to do what I usually do: take apart things I have around and don’t use to make it into something I will use.

This tutorial will show you how to take an already knitted up sweater like the one shown and get it ready to be knit into something else. In this case, I’m planning on knitting a cotton sock which I will then dip dye after it is knitted.

For this tutorial you will need a sweater, a small crochet hook, a pair of scissors and a seam ripper. You’ll also need patience and a steady hand. The type of sweater used is the most important element though, you need to be sure that the sweater is not finished with raw edges, you can only do this with a sweater that is knit traditionally and then assembled from finished pieces. Otherwise you’ll undo all the seams and end up with 4,000 strands of two foot long yarn. To check that your sweater will work look at the arm seams or side seams, there will not be thread wrapped around the edges, it will look like a finished knit edge and be stitched together in a straight line with yarn.

As you can see above there are rolled over knit edges on the seam, and my scissors are snipping out yarn not thread. Very carefully work your scissors into the seam and cut the yarn that holds the seam together. DO NOT cut the fabric yarn as it will pull out your sweater stitches like Weezer’s The Sweater Song.

Work on the thread you’ve snipped until you’ve pulled out a few seam stitches. On the seam stitches of a sleeve or the side seam on the body if you keep working carefully without tying a knot in the yarn you will get to a place where you can pull on the yarn gently and the whole seam will come out in one tug. This is really fun.

There may come some spots where the yarn will not pull out, this is especially true where more complex knitting, like fair isle, comes to the seam. In these cases it is good to take your time and pull out the seam yarn with a crochet hook.

When I came to the raglan sleeve seam I couldn’t find a yarn stitch that would pull straight out like the arm seam did. So I turned the fabric inside out to the wrong side, as shown in the dashes above and found the yarn seam that was holding it together, indicated in red. Using a seam ripper I removed every other stitch very carefully as to not cut through any of the fabric stitches. I tried to take a picture of this, but it was nearly impossible, so hopefully the illustration will be enough.

Once you’ve undone all of the seams and have a flat piece of fabric, in this case the sleeve, you will find the working yarn and you can pull on it to unravel the fabric into crimped up yarn. You could ball this up, but you could also just knit out the stitches unraveling as you go, which is what I have been doing.

Cotton socks, here I come!