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How to Make a Vest from an Old Pullover Sweater

April 7th, 2009 in patterns & designs, fashion, restyle

Lee Meredith, contributor

7 users recommend

Add edge embellishments to your vest if you want to prevent curling edges.

A little embroidery adds a lot to a simple, solid-color vest.

By carefully taking the sleeves off your sweater, youre left with finished vest sleeve edges.

Add edge embellishments to your vest if you want to prevent curling edges.

Photo: Pete Bejarano

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Now that spring is here, it's time to reconstruct some winter sweaters into cute new vests—simply take off the sleeves to make your vest, then add whatever embellishments you want! If you have an oversized wool sweater, you could wash it to felt/shrink it, then cut the sleeves off since they won't unravel, but I'm going to show you how to take the sleeves of a nonfelted sweater to leave a finished edge for your vest. I like using cotton (or cotton blend) sweaters, since they'll be better for spring or summer wear, but you could use a sweater of any fiber content for this project.

You'll need:

V-neck pullover sweater with sleeve/shoulder seams shaped like a vest (not raglan style)
Seam ripper and scissors
Whatever embellishment materials and tools you want

To turn your pullover into a vest, all you really need to do is take off the sleeves, but then you can use your favorite forms of embellishment to personalize it—crochet, embroidery with yarn or floss, machine- or hand-sewing, appliqué... Be creative!

Start with a V-neck pullover with shoulder seams that will make a good vest shape.

First, figure out what kind of seams you're dealing with. Most mass-produced sweaters have crocheted seams, which are the easiest to take out. If you are unlucky and your sweater has serged seams, you won't be able to take the sleeve off and have a finished edge because the edge has already been cut. Serged seams look like they have thread wrapped around them, and you can see that the knit pieces are cut inside the thread. If this is the case, and you still want to use the sweater, you can just cut the sleeve off, then either sew or crochet around the edge to prevent it from unraveling. The third type of seam you might have is a sewn seam—if your sweater's label says "hand knit," then you might have sewn seams. If this is the case, you'll need to use your seam ripper to carefully cut the yarn/thread and take the pieces apart.

This is what a crocheted seam looks like—you can see a small crochet chain on one side of the seam.

To take apart a crocheted seam, you basically just need to cut the chain at the end and find the right place to pull so it all comes undone. I find the easiest way to do this is usually to get my seam ripper under a chain loop at the end and break it.

You should break a loop as close to the end of the chain as possible, which is usually on one side of the armpit or the shoulder.

Then use your fingers or the seam ripper to pull the next chain loop back to find a piece of the cut thread sticking out and pull it. If that was the right thread, then pulling it will make the chain loops come undone; if not, then see if there's another thread to pull, or you might need to cut another chain loop and try again.

Pulling this thread made the chain loop to the left come undone.

Once you find the right thread and pull it out for a few chains, look on the other side of the seam. There should be a long loop of thread reaching across from where you pulled the thread to where the chain is undone.

This is what the other side of the seam should look like once you start unraveling the crochet chain.

Pull that loop, and keep pulling to take out the whole crochet chain. It'll probably stop at the armpit or shoulder point, where you might need to break out the seam ripper again. The most important thing here is to be super careful not to cut any yarn strands on the body side of the sweater. Try to cut only the seaming yarn/thread, and if you must cut other strands to break the pieces apart, look closely and cut only strands on the sleeve side. It's best to use only your seam ripper and avoid scissors here because you can be more precise with cutting one strand at a time with the seam ripper.

Look closely at every single strand you break when taking the pieces apart so that you don't cut into the body of your vest.

Once each sleeve is taken off, look at the ends of the sweater body (now vest) seams, where the shoulder seam and side seam end. You may need to stitch the ends if you accidentally cut or pulled the wrong yarn (it happens, I've done it!) or tie yarn ends securely so they can't come unraveled.

That yarn coming off the shoulder seam needed to be tied down so it wouldn't come undone later.

Now that your sweater is sleeveless and the seams are all secure, you have yourself a vest! You can try it on now and see how it looks/fits to figure out what more you want to do to it. The new edges of this orange-striped example, knit in stockinette stitch, wanted to curl under when I tried it on, so I knew I wanted to add some kind of edge embellishment to keep it from doing so.

The edge is nice and finished, but it likes to curl under because of the knit stitch type.

The seam on this white cabled vest I made, however, stays nice and flat because of its stitch pattern, so I left the edges alone.

Your vest's edges may look great without any extra stitching added to the new edges.

So, on the orange one, I decided to hand-stitch on a weird knit tape found at my local craft thrift store. Look around at your craft stash and you may find something cool to add to your vest—I forgot I even had this tape until I dug through a drawer and rediscovered it!

Not-perfect hand-stitching adds a personal touch to my new vest creation.

On this purple vest I made, the edges also wanted to curl but not too badly, so I embellished it with a blanket stitch in a contrasting cotton yarn.

Blanket stitch is always a great choice for embellishment!

Once your sleeve edges are finished, you can decide if you want to add more, which I would definitely recommend! It all depends on what you have to work with and what crafty skills you want to use, so look at your vest and visualize what you'd like to add on. My purple vest happened to already have a pocket in the original sweater, so I did some stitching on the pocket (as well as on one shoulder).

You don't have to be a master embroidery artist to stitch simple lines and shapes like these.

My white vest was plain and simple—sure, it had cables, but I'm not really a fan of white clothing, so it definitely needed something more. So I added some colorful pockets from a felted stripey scarf...

When machine-sewing pieces onto your vest, use a zigzag stitch so the fabric can stretch without breaking the thread.

...and then I crocheted along a few of the cables! I stuck my hook between the knit stitches and made chains on top, bringing my yarn under the knit stitches along with the cables. This was super fun, so if you know how to crochet, I recommend playing around with a hook and yarn on your vest!

If you want to machine-wash your vest, be sure to use yarn that's machine washable, of course.

Then on my orange-striped vest, I wanted to add a pocket to that one, too (I love pockets!), so I got experimental. I cut a piece off the end of a sleeve and crocheted along the cut edge so it won't unravel. Then I stitched on the bottom edge in a big curve and sewed the top ribbed edge unstretched on top.

It's a weird pocket, but it's unique and functional!

So these are just a few ideas for embellishing your vest—use whatever techniques you love most, whatever materials you have in your stash, and have fun with it! It's always great to use leftover and recycled materials whenever possible, and this project is especially friendly to that, since you'll need small amounts of yarn/thread/fabric for most additions.