The Yarn Harlot has been quoted to have said that when a hand-knit sock of hers gets a hole in it, she holds it over the trash can and says “Oh darn!” as she drops it in. I must confess, I join her in this sentiment.
A year ago I knit my mom a sweater for Christmas. She loved it and wore it proudly.
Then a happy little moth came along and thought it would be a good idea to take a nibble (or two). There was a hole in the sleeve…
…and a hole at the seam between the sleeve and the right front.
Since my mother loved the sweater dearly, she wanted me to fix it. I was rather reluctant, having tried such a fix once before with no success. I told her I no longer had the yarn, so it couldn’t be done.
A couple months later, she discovered the yarn somewhere in her house – I had given it to her to use for practice since she had thought she might revive her knitting skills. She called me and excitedly told me she was sending me the sweater and the yarn. Inwardly, I groaned.
Generally repairs are made using duplicate stitch. That means you run a fresh strand of yarn over the existing stitches. This technique is often used in situations where you want colorwork but it isn’t practical to work the various colors while you are knitting using techniques such as intarsia or fair isle.
The problem with duplicate stitching is that since the yarn is doubled in the area where the duplicate stitching is done, the texture of the fabric is completely different. The yarn doesn’t have room to move around as it normally does and the patch is stiff compared to the other fabric. So even if I could duplicate stitch over the holes perfectly with the same yarn I used to knit the sweater, odds were that you could still easily find where the repairs had been attempted.
Today as I was going through old magazines, I found an article in the February – April 2012 issue of Cast On about using duplicate stitch to mend your knitting. Deborah Swift showed how you could run a contrasting color of yarn through the sts where the needle would have gone through them as they were worked, making it easier to do the duplicate stitching correctly. I decided to give it a try.
I ran the yarn through the area with the hole in the sleeve. With a trained eye, you can see that two stitches were severed by the moth, in the same column of sts in adjacent rows.
When moths create a hole in the sweater, they break strands of yarn, then the area unravels and creates a hole. In this case, two strands were broken. Because the strands were otherwise intact (vs. the condition of the fabric had it simply worn thin and then develop into a hole), the stiffness effect of the duplicate stitching would be at its full intensity.
After several tries, I managed to do an acceptable job of tracing where the stitches should have gone. Can you tell where I did the repair?
I think it could only be more obvious had I used bright orange yarn to do the duplicate stitching.
I also attempted to fix the hole at the seam (again, see the picture above for the results), but because of everything going on with the seam there, it was especially difficult to determine exactly which strands had been broken, much less figure out where exactly to do the duplicate stitching.
In the end, I would say my efforts at repair were a bust.
If I ever knit a sweater for someone else in the future, it will be done with the understanding that if it needs to be repaired, I will not be the one doing it. I hate darning!
Just have to comment on your “darned good” repair job. I totally understand the inward groan at the thought of attempting the repair, smile. But I also know (as I’m sure you do too) how hard it is to give up a such a great sweater to a hungry moth. It may be easy to see where the repair was made when you are holding the sweater up and and looking at the sleeve, but when your mom is wearing the sweater you made for her, she’s not looking at the sleeve, she’s feeling the warmth and love you knit into every stitch. And when others see the sweater, they’re looking at the lovely detail of the cabling on the front and your mom’s smiling face. I think you did a great job of mending a treasure, and me, well the best I could’ve done is taken needle and thread and try to catch the broken pieces of yarn, tug them together and hope it would hold. Kudos on a beautiful sweater and a nice save!
Tana: 1 – Moths: 0
I hope you are dodging the severe weather and were not in the path of the tornadoes! ~Teri