I hope one of you lovely woolly-minded ladies can help me out ;)

I bought a machine-knitted jumper recently, which is beautiful but far too long (about 18"!). I want to try and take it up on my sewing machine... is that possible? I'm a fairly novice sewer, but thought I could cut off the bottom of the jumper and overlock it before hemming under.

Because the wool is very fine, would it be best to use a zigzag stitch to keep a bit of stretch?

It's such a nice jumper I don't want to ruin it. Any help and advice greatly received - thank you!

I'm not so sure that would work, cutting the bottom off things has never worked for me, you might damage the wool while you are doing that. Maybe you could do it by hand, work out what stitch you can use, this might be a good guideline (http://www.startsewing.co.uk/BasicHandSewing.html)

Thanks Moonfire - that's a helpful site. I was hoping it was going to be easy-peasy! I might have to pass it over to my mum, she's a much better handsewer than I am.

On closer inspection, there's a frill detail on the bottom of the jumper that I was going to get rid of. That looks basted on, so maybe it can be used to hide any disasters. :D

I think that the initial plan sounds ok. I would overcast the edges and then turn it to finish. If you are making it shorter it shouldn't unravel easily from the bottom especially if you make sure that all the stitches are caught in the overcast. I have obviously never tried this so could be talking out of my bottom - Wool4brains will be the one who knows I would think...

I did find some pages on shortening sleeves which I guess is a similar idea but done differently http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1186825#post37450791

If it's a machine knit then does that mean that it's very fine? If it is then I'm sure you could overlock at the desired spot, cut off the bottom of the jumper, remove the rib or whatever bottom it has from the strip you've removed and then either turn the bottom under to finish or reattach the original bottom to it.

I have done this with a machine knit which was using thicker yarn and a looser stitch though and it was relatively easy because I'd done the jumper myself. The jumper was done on the machine and then the rib added downwards, so I just unravelled the rib, ran a contrasting thread through all the stitches on the row I wanted to start with and used nail scissors to snip below each stitch.

That left me with a complete set of stitches which I then mounted on the machine and used as a basis to graft on the rib again, but if I was doing it by hand I could have just picked up the stitches on needles and put the rib back on.

Thanks everyone. Ues Medusa, it's a very fine knit. The reason I like it enough to faff about is because it's so soft!

I'll have another look at it, and will report back if I am brave enough to try :o