How to Turn a Rectangle Into a Shrug

What all of the patterns highlighted in this blog post have in common is that the “sleeves” of the shrug are made by simply seaming up several inches of the edges of the rectangle, leaving a space in the middle for you to put the shrug on. It’s quick and easy, but if you need a little help with your seaming, be sure to check out our tutorials.

Knitters, click here for tutorials on several seaming techniques. Crocheters, click here for our invisible sewn seam tutorial or click here for the slip stitch seam tutorial.

This particular shrug is designed to be a cropped length, so it sits just above Michelle’s waist, but we do have lots of patterns for oversized shrugs too. Click here for our fan-favorite Simple Crochet Shrug.

Some shrug patterns, like this one, will have a very open front, in which you’ll mostly only see the sleeves when viewing it from the front. Depending on how “tall” the rectangle of the shrug is and how it’s seamed up, you’ll find that some shrugs will have more of a short-sleeved-cardigan-like look. Click here for an example, our Knit Ruffle Shrug.

The taller the rectangle, the more the fabric will show at the front (and the longer the back of the shrug). The wider the rectangle, the longer the “sleeves”.

In this particular shrug, we’ve used 1×1 ribbing on the edges of the rectangle to create cuffs. Even though there’s no increasing or decreasing in this shrug’s overall stitch count, the ribbing creates an illusion of the fabric gathering. We use this in other ways on other shrugs. For instance, with our Knit Speckled Shrug, ribbing is used to create a “collar,” while in our Crochet Sequoia Shrug, the overall back-loop stitches (which create a ribbed look) add a lot of shape on their own, so no additional stitch pattern is needed.