In the past I've had great success (and savings) repairing Eileen Fisher sweaters, so when I came across an incredible bargain at my TJ Maxx store, I was ready for another save.
A large hole on the right front of this sweater had driven the price down from $298 to $6. A quick look at the yarn convinced me that the texture would help hide my repairs. What I didn't see is that this isn't simple stockinette stitch, but a slipped stitch pattern with two yarns - a hand knitting weight black and tan marled yarn and a heavy black thread. The thread's breaking was what had caused the hole.
A much longer look still didn't leave me with much more insight into the structure of the stitch. While it was clearly a slip stitch pattern because not every stitch was worked in a row of the black thread, I could not get a sense of any regular pattern, i.e. k1, sl 1 or k2, sl 1, etc. So, I collected the dropped stitches onto a size US #7 needle, since that seemed about right. I thought that the length of the yarn strands from the dropped stitches might give me a clue as to how many of the stitches had been knit vs. slipped, again it didn't seem to be a regular pattern.
So, I just kinda re-knit as many stitches as I had yarn to work and recreated the rows up to the point at which the break occurred. Then I took two strands of a heavy upholstery thread to simulate the original black thread/yarn and worked a Kitchener seam.
In all this maneuvering, I had not found the other end of the broken heavy black thread. So I continued with my upholstery thread and ran it back and forth through the back of the thick stitches to anchor my repair. This resulted in a somewhat stiffer fabric, but less concern over future unraveling. The finished appearance is not seamless with the surrounding fabric, but, as I had determined up front, the heavy texture does help hide the repair.
To test the success I sent the sweater off to my daughter at college since she (and not I) wears an extra small. She has had it a week with no comments or questions, so I think it has passed. Fingers crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment