Cashmere First Aid

Regardless of how hopelessly unbecoming a sweater is, if it's made of cashmere I cling to it for dear life. I fool myself into thinking that somehow the soft cashmere feeling will overshadow how frumpy it looks and hope that no one will notice that the colour makes it look like I'm suffering from vitamin C deficiency.
Still, there are only so many times you feel like wearing a sweater that brings out all your worst features, even if it happened to be handmade by cashmere virgins.

This particular sweater has seen me through many a cold evening, kept me snug and warm despite it's apparent flaws. I obviously wanted to keep it, but it needed help.

The two major flaws were:
1. Loose turtle neck. It was like the neck couldn't decide what to do or where to go.
2. The colour, pale ash grey, Siberian cemetery comes to mind.

Unfortunately I don't have a before picture, but after a few rounds of dying, cutting and sewing, it now looks like this:

First I dyed it in the washing machine with dark blue dye. I didn't know what colour it would end up being, but I new it had to be better than the starting point. Then I cut off the turtle neck and sewed stripy bias tape around the neck opening. I simply love bias tape. It adds, it freshens up, it is such an easy way of improving and putting a personal touch on the clothes. Finally I put red thread in the sewing machine and sewed with big, red, stitches along the neckline and on top of the side seams of the sweater. 

I'm already looking forward to fall so I can start wearing it again. When you think about how much energy, effort, labour and pollution that goes into producing one single piece of clothings, it makes total sense to try to rescue what you have, instead of filling up our closets with even more stuff.