Mariah March Mulligan

 Here's my Mariah sweater when I made it in 2009.

It took a long time and a lot of redos, and I was very happy to have it done and to be able to wear it.

But when I started wearing it, it became obvious that the sleeves were too long.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to roll the sleeves up

but it just didn't work. It was even worse under the leather jacket that I like to wear over the sweater:

That certainly isn't attractive!

And trying to fold over cuffs under the jacket was ugly and uncomfortable.

So on a Friday night, I gathered up the tools:

Ruler, scissors, crochet hook, dpn in the right size, computer to look up notes on Ravelry and the original pattern on knitty, and a pen and paper for taking notes. (There are two sleeves. It's nicer if they match!)

First thing, I measured how much shorter I needed to make the sleeves (2.5") and how long the cabled ribbing section was (2"). Then I went up 4.5" (2.5+2) from the bottom, counted the rows so I could make the second match, and snipped a strand.

I started to ravel the row I had cut

and put the stitches onto needles.

When the whole row was on needles, I just had the seam to undo. I cut the sewing yarn at the bottom and took it out up to the point where I was going to start knitting again.

Then it was simply a matter of knitting the cable ribbing down from there. I decided to knit the cuff in the round so that I didn't have to sew a seam even though the original sleeve was knit flat. I made sure to decrease the selvage stitches so that the two parts would be the same width.

There is a shift of half a stitch where the knitting changes direction (because I knit the sleeve from the bottom up originally and now was reknitting the cuff from the top down) but you have to look pretty close to notice it. Plus, have you noticed the sweater is black? You can't see anything anyway.

One advantage of how this all worked out is that I could try the sweater on as I went and check the sleeve length.

When I got the perfect length, I cast off. And then repeated the same thing with the other sleeve. (I had a little waking nightmare of shortening the same sleeve twice rather than doing two different sleeves, but I double checked a few times, and didn't make that mistake!)

And I was rewarded with a sweater with sleeves that fit and feel good!

See? They even fit under my jacket:

It feels so much better!

Another March Mulligan completed. Another project saved. Love it!