Hygge (Refashioned Sweater)

This sweater has been sitting in my mending/ refashioning box forever! Peter bought it during his term abroad in Stockholm (winter 1998/99) and as you can see on the "before" picture, it was huge by current fashion standards. I removed the sleeves because I originally planned to take the body in and then add set-in sleeves. However, when Peter tried on the pinned body we thought that since there´s a distinct yolk part, the sweater would also look cool with dropped shoulders. This decision made my life a lot easier because the original sleeve would have been too short for set-in sleeves anyway and I would have needed to come up with a creative solution for this. So I sewed the sleeves back on and stitched the underarm and side seams with a short stitch length (using a small zig zag stitch to allow stretching). I serged the edges leaving approximately 1cm of seam allowance. Hopefully this will be enough to prevent unraveling. Since the body was too long, I harvested the lower band and sewed it back on at the end, again using a short and small zig zag stitch. Unfortunately, even though I had added 1.5cm seam allowance, I could not serge the bands without stretching and unraveling them (the intarsia pattern made the edges more fragile than expected). Therefore, I handstitched the seam allowance on the body and band, respectively. This has the advantage that the seam is very flat now and it´s barely visible that the band is sewed on and not knit on.