Challenge Accepted

Earlier this summer I completed repairs on a commercial sweater. One of my students had a friend whose favorite sweater looked like an alligator had chewed on the cuffs. I suspect a backstory but I don't know it. I didn't take a lot of pictures of the sweater. I probably should have. One of the challenges was the sleeves were worked cuff up (bottom up) rather than top down. This meant repairing the damaged sleeves included recreating the cast-on, re-knitting the damaged fabric, and grafting the hole closed in pattern. If the sleeves had been worked in the other direction, it would have been a much simpler repair involving ripping back and re-knitting.

The repair was further complicated by the stranded construction of the sweater. I was using similar but not identical yarn. I eventually figured out I needed to pull some plies off the replacement black yarn to bring it down to match in girth. This also meant all the knitting and grafting used multiple plies. This was one of those tasks that could only be done for a few hours a day in good light. It required uninterrupted concentration. I definitely upped my repair skills!

If you, dear reader, are facing such a task, I thought it would be useful for you to see my process.

First, stabilize. You'll notice plastic safety pins to secure stitches so they can't run. The short double-pointed needle or cable needle is handy for capturing live stitches. The pink yarn is duplicate-stitched across a row to make it easier for me to discern which stitches are on which rows.

For difficult repairs, my technique is to work a temporary repair with each row using different colors of size 10 crochet cotton.

There are multiple advantages to this technique. The disadvantage is it takes longer. The advantage is I can make the repair correctly. Since each row is its own color and strand, I can remove and redo an incorrect row. I have the freedom to get something mostly right but not perfect and then correct it. On a complicated repair, every stitch you get right brings you closer to success. I use different colors so I can clearly differentiate rows. When the temporary repair meets my standards, then I can duplicate stitch in the final repair. The bright cotton crochet thread is easily removed. I can even reuse it!

Here is the repair partway through the final patch. It is looking more orderly. There's a wale of unruly purl stitches left of center where the yarn was physically broken.

And here is the final completed repair.

The whole process took about 2 intense hours. This is very much knitting surgery.

This repair isn't perfect. I've had much better luck with less complex repairs, sometimes having repairs that were nearly invisible. Perfect repairs require identical yarn and tension. There were multiple broken yarns ends to weave in, which made the patch thicker than the surrounding fabric. But this repair is good enough that it isn't obvious to other people that the sweater has been mended. For a much-beloved garment, giving it a longer life is well worth the imperfection!