unraveling a sweater

**I enjoy unraveling sweaters because it gives me the availability to knit with higher quality yarns such as 100% cotton, linen, cashmere, or wool.**

Step 1: Find a sweater. I get most of my sweaters from the Salvation Army or my sister (when she no longer likes it). Before you start this project you do have to evaluate the sweater. This involves looking at the seams. If you can unroll the seam and see yarn stitching the two sides together that is what you want. You may also notice that the seams coming together look like a ladder (see below). You do not want a sweater that is surged together or machine stitched. This will end up with short lengths of yarn instead of a ball.

Step 3: Next unroll the seam and cut the ladder with either your seam ripper or scissors. Be careful at this point to only cut the ladder stitches and not the sweater itself.

Step 4: I unstitched the sleeves from the body as well as the side seams of the sweater and then realized that although most of the seams were rolled the shoulder seams were serged. But it is not all lost. I cut the seam off with some scissors. Although this is not ideal you can salvage a sweater if only the shoulder seam is surged.

Step 5: Now comes the fun part balling up your new yarn. Here I am using a ball winder but you can definitely do this with just your hands. One tip is to roll your sweater piece up like a burrito. This just makes unraveling a little easier.

**Step 7: This step is optional. If you want to know the exact yardage you can use a Niddy Noddy. This will produce a skein of yarn.