I recently bought a sweater for my youngest and the sleeves were WAY too long. I knew this when I bought it, but figured I’d sew seams like I did for her jacket. Well, when I started investigating the construction, I saw that the sweater wasn’t just knit material sewn with thread, but actually knitted to shape and the seams joined with yarn. Hmm. I’ve seen a bunch of Pinterest pins on grafting, maybe I should try that.

I attacked the first sleeve by undoing the seam and using that yarn to stitch the cuff where I wanted it, then undid the knitting. Nope. It is functional, but not seamless.

On the second sleeve I removed the seam first again, then clipped the knitting at the top of what needed to go. I carefully (oh so carefully) undid the stitches and picked up the loops on a circular needle as I went. (I tried putting the circular needle in a row first, but kept accidentally switching rows.) I then frogged it (rip it rip it rip it), down to the cuff where I carefully picked up loops again on a circular needle.

The sleeve had more stitches than the cuff, so I had to center the cuff and use some of the now spare yarn to graft the loops from the two needles together following these directions. Then I sewed the seam and did have to trim some knit fabric off. I did accidentally graft from the inside, but it was a happy accident because the perl side went better with the sweater pattern!