How To Comb A Sweater Back To Life

10 May By 4 Comments

 

Okay – hold the phone!  Could I really be the last person on earth to find out about this magical thing called a sweater comb???

I have tried using a razor to get pills off of sweaters.  The razor took a LOT of effort to do a lousy job.  I have tried the battery-operated sweater shaver.  It shaved a hole in my sweater.  I have tried to ignore the pills on my sweaters, but I can’t.  So, in my closet, when a good sweater goes bad because of pills, it is hopeless.  Many a good sweater has gone down this way.  They don’t know how to “just say no” to pills.

Before showing them the tough-love and moving them out the door, I sometimes hold on to my favorite sweaters.  I guess my hope it that the next time I take it out, the pills will have magically disappeared.  Or at least become less of an issue.  Alas, no such thing has happened and I have had to cut ties with many otherwise good, upstanding sweaters…

…until I discovered the sweater comb!!!

This little wonder-tool has magical teeth which are able to chew off those pills like nobody’s business.

It took my favorite sweater from this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe it is hard for you to understand the depth of my attachment to this sweater.  What can I say – it just works.  It does everything – color, length, style - to work for me.  Unfortunately, I am finding that more and more of my clothes are fitting differently these days.  I have heard this starts to happen in your late 40′s.  I am fighting back, but in the meantime, I am really grateful for what this sweater does for me and I am so happy to be able to revive it.

To make my point abundantly clear, I shall now bust-a-move and show you exactly why this is the Plenty Perfect Peri-Menopausal Sweater.  I hope you have the good fortune to own a sweater like this as you move through the changes in your life!

 

 

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Boring gray goes understated glam.

9 Nov By Leave a Comment
I like things with a little sparkle.  A little.  Not a lot.  Usually I like sparkle best when it is with something totally opposite to create contrast – like rusted iron, weathered saddle leather, white cotton or faded jeans.  This morning, I decided to set my boring gray cotton cardigan free from it’s monotonous life and give it something to live for – a bit of understated, fun sparkle!
I had saved some sparkly buttons from a shirt I didn’t like and they are now jazzing up this gray cardigan.  I wore my “new” cardigan all day with jeans and cowboy boots and felt very smart.  Here are some tricks I learned along the way.
1.  First, you have to remove the buttons from the boring sweater and that takes a bit of attention.  Be very careful to cut only the threads holding the button on or you will make a big hole in your boring sweater.  It doesn’t deserve that.  Your boring sweater is on the verge of being transformed - so be careful.

carefully remove boring buttons from boring sweater

2.  Check to make sure your sparkly buttons will fit through the sweater’s button holes.  Since mine did not, I decided to re-use the old boring buttons on the back of the placket and button the sweater in reverse.  I also discovered that I liked the back of the boring buttons much better than the fronts (the brushed pewter was a nice contrast against sparkle too!), so I flipped them over when I sewed them back on.
3.  Use a double threaded needle and start from the back of the front placket.  Go through the sparkly button and come back through to the back.  On the back side, pass your needle through the double knotted thread to be sure the knot does not slip through the sweater material.

boring button on back side of placket

4.  On the back side of the placket, sew the boring button on, passing the needle through the sparkly button directly behind it on the front side several times to secure both buttons.
5.  Repeat this process for each button.  When you are done, the sweater should have a row of boring buttons along the inside of the placket and a row of sparkly buttons on the front of the placket, directly opposite each other.

gray sweater is going to want to be worn all the time now!

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