Sadly I had to make this decision with the Ugly Christmas Sweater which was just unwearable, and nothing I could do to 'rescue' it seemed to work. In a fit of pique and on a hot summer's day I began the long and painstaking process of unpicking it all, right back down to the bare balls of wool...
"WHYYYYY!" I hear you scream. Simply because the pattern I was working from was terrible, had really poor instructions on attaching sleeves and finishing off the neck, so the finished sweater - which looked like a sweater at least, for my very first attempt - just wouldn't sit right on anything except the back of my knitting chair. Given that it used about 6 balls of grey yarn and four red, it was an expensive foray into making something wearable and one I was determined to have another crack at.
So unpicked (and oh my grud was Fair Isle ever 'fun' to unpick, I think now I can pretty much untangle just about any jumbled mess of yarn or cables almost in my sleep after this). Eventually I got back to a point where my yarn wasn't too damaged (one of the risks of unpicking a project is that your yarn will become 'worked' and won't knit nicely ever again).
So what did I do with all that leftover yarn? I reined in my ambition and began another sweater, this time working from a PROPER pattern with proper making-up instructions, and a much simpler design (no more fair isle, just bog standard garter / stockinette stitch).
Finding a pattern was actually harder than I thought as it seems most patterns opt for knitting in the round on round needles (all power to you if you can manage to knit a seamless sweater THAT way) but eventually I found this one which really is as simple as they come:
How to Knit a Sweater for Beginners (with Pictures) - wikiHow
With some decent diagrams and a fairly 'loose' pattern, hopefully MK 2 will actually be something I can wear (and just in time too as the weather is feeling pretty autumnal today).
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