I bought this sweater at a thrift warehouse in Michigan sometime in the spring of 2017 for $4. I liked the bold pastel green, and the cotton yarn was of good quality, so I figured I’d eventually unravel it and knit it into something else. What actually happened to it was less dramatic, but still worth noting.
My sister took a liking to the sweater as it was. Except for, you know, the serious ’80s-workout-gear vibe that it had. We decided that I’d mitigate that in two ways: one, by getting rid of that turtleneck; and two, by attempting to dye the entire thing black.
Removing a turtleneck piece is not a big deal, but I don’t think I’ve knitted a collar in a while and I didn’t have any obvious ideas for what to do with this one. As a result, I picked up a bunch of stitches onto a pair of short circular #3 needles and experimented. Ended up just doing an outward-facing stockinette for a short rolled collar. The seam-line from picking up stitches kept flipping outward over the back kind of annoyingly, so I put some thread on a needle and went around stitching it downwards into place on the inside. Okay, that would work.
I haven’t done a lot of clothes-dyeing, but I stopped at an art-supply store and bought a couple of packages of black dye for $6 each. Back at home, I attempted to dye the thing in the washing machine. The result was very even, but the colour only got halfway to black. It’s sort of a dark moss green now, almost grey-green. However! My sister liked the results and said we could totally stop here. So we did.
This was a pair of minor changes that resulted from me messing around, but still the recipient joked that I’d done an almost ‘Make, Thrift, Buy‘ sort of thing. I take this as quite the compliment.
Behold the Thing 