She's Crafty: A cardigan

Getting into my craftiness a bit more which may or may not be attributed to the addition of pinterest to my life.  Today, I was overcome with the need to do something or get rid of a sweater my Mom got me for Christmas.  It's a nice sweater, but a bit too big and a bit too blue for me, and I lost the receipt so I couldn't exchange it if I wanted to.  I found a tutorial on how to make a cardigan out of old sweaters from this neat blog.  It was pretty straight forward, but I have to admit, I would have never thought to make a cardigan.  Sweater cardigans are not common in my wardrobe.  I usually opt for a hoodie, but for that reason and because I now work in an office where hoodie's would most certainly be frowned upon...a cardigan was a great idea!

So between Samantha's 4th birthday party and the superbowl party I ran to JoAnn Fabrics to pick up some bias tape, lace, and snaps.  I started around 4:30pm with this sweater:

By 6pm, as I'm rushing to get as much done before the Superbowl, it looked a little dicey:

I cut the sweater down the center, always the most stressful part.  I used 1" bias tape that I cut in half and wrapped around the edge of the sweater.  The first go didn't work so well, but thankfully, I just cut another line off the sweater and none's the wiser.

My stitching is never very good.  At least in my opinion.  There's always a lot of "well, that's good enough" when I start sewing, so I  picked up grey 1" lace.  Neat trick....it hides all my bad stitching!

During the first half of the game, I hand sewed snaps on the top.  I've never worked with snaps or buttons before (they intimidate me).  It was a bit trickier than I anticipated.  Took a little improvising to sew the snaps on without showing any thread on the outside of the sweater.

And ta-da...well before the Patriots tanked in the Superbowl, I was finished!

I may add some embellishments later on if I can find any I like, but for now, I'm pretty proud of it.