My Felted Mariah
I just finished another cardigan with a zipper. This time I made Jodi Green’s Mariah (here’s in Ravelry, and my Ravelry project). I’d like to be able to say that it turned out great, and without a hitch, but as most knitters know, that is not always the case.
It turned out huge. I made my swatch, and checked my gauge as I was making it, but it still came out too big.
I looked around online to find a fix for this, and most people recommended to frog and redo, or to give it away. No way! I’m too lazy and selfish to do that, so I felted it.
Felting is not for the faint-of-hart, so I can’t, in good conscience, recommend you try it. I was lucky, and careful and it turned out OK, but it could have just as easily turned out in a complete disaster.
If you insist on trying it, here’s what I did:
- I first tried doing it by hand in my bathroom sink, alternating between hot and cold water. Try this way first to see how the yarn will react. Even better, try it with a swatch first. If you have to shrink just a tad, this may do the trick, but I needed it to shrink several inches from all sides (my sleeves, for example, needed to go from 25 in. to 22 in.)
- After trying the previous technique a couple of times with very little shrinkage, in a fit of rage I threw it in the washing machine and measured the sleeves every minute to make sure I wasn’t overdoing it. After about 4 minutes it was done.
Here’s the result:
A perfect fit, but the cables don’t stand out as nicely as before. I’ll still wear it with pride… in winter, because it’s like an oven in there!
The next step was to add the zipper. As most of the women in my knit night know, my mom does my zippers for me, which is a bit of a pain because I only see her every six months (I have to time my cardigans carefully).
The problem is that my mom got fed up and told me to pay attention because she wasn’t going to do it again… So for the second part of this article, here’s a tutorial on how to put a zipper on a knitted item.
I documented step by step what my mom did, so hopefully next time I’ll be able to do it on my own.
Step 0: Find a zipper
Before you start, you need a zipper. If you are lucky, you’ll find a zipper that fits your cardigan nicely. Since this cardigan is a difficult one, it required a 19 in. zipper. Zippers only come in even numbers (18 in. or 20 in.) But luckily, you can modify your zipper to fit by removing the extra teeth, and moving the zipper stopper thingies (I don’t know what they are called). Here’s my 20 in. zipper in the process of being shortened:
Use pliers for removing the stoppers and teeth. Be careful not to break the stoppers, you’ll need them later. The teeth you can just yank off.
I haven’t tried this with plastic zippers. My feeling is that you’d need new stoppers, since the original ones would break while being removed.
Step 1: Baste the edges together
You want the edges of your sweater to match, so you have to baste them together like so:
If you don’t know how to baste, about.com has a How to Baste Tutorial.
Step 2: Baste the zipper in place
You can try to just pin the zipper in place, but they may get in the way when you try to sew them in. What my mom did was to first pin the zipper in place, and then baste it:
Step 3: Sew it in place
You can do it by hand, but you’ll probably want to do it with a sewing machine. Just read your sewing’s machine instructions on how to use the special foot for attaching zippers:
Just go slow, and try to go on a straight line.
The result
I’ll try to do it on my own next time. It’s pretty straight forward.