Cropped Cardigans

My friend Laura wanted a few cardigans cropped to be shorter. There are quite a few tutorials online for this kind of thing, and it seemed very straight forward. Of course, I measured about twelve times before cutting and then I found out the sweaters were all a little bit different so that was annoying. One of the four I cropped was a full inch longer than the others. Just for funzies (and to annoy me!).

I cut the middle of the sweater out so that I could attach the ribbing to the top part of the sweater. The button spacing, thankfully, aligned close to correctly so that was nice, but if I were making it a different size, I could see the button spacing being too short between the top and the ribbing. I needed to pin everything pretty intensely, because it was stretchy material and the machine tends to pull the bottom through faster than the top so if you're not careful, you can get some large differences between the two fabrics you are sewing.

All of the tutorials recommended a zigzag stitch, which is usually what should be used for this. However, I found that a different stitch was better -- I think it's a modified blind stitch but I can't seem to find the correct name for it on the interwebs. This stitch has the zigzag but also has a few straight stitches on each side (this is the stitch I have used to hem at least a dozen of my brother's shirts). This caused the fabric to ripple less since there was less thread going back and forth. In the end, all the cardigans looked nice and cropped, and Laura was very happy with her newly modified cardigans! The sleeves didn't need any modification because they were already 3/4 sleeve but they could be modified exactly like the main part of the cardigan.