Mending A Knitted Sweater

A friend of mine asked me if there was any possibility for saving her favourite sweater after tearing a big hole in it. As I’m a fan of Make Do & Mend more than Buy & Waste (as well as being a crafts geek), I gave it a try, even though I’ve never actually mended a hole in knitted fabrics before.

The Hole

The torn hole was initially just a few rows big, but after wear it had unravelled into a big one.

The Recovery

I used a crochet needle to pick up the dropped stitches, until I only had the torn rows left. To make sure the stitches didn’t unravel more while working, I secured the stitches with handy stitch markers. Safety pins do the same trick.

The Patch

Since the yarn was worn thin also around the hole, I picked up the stitches a bit underneath and on the sides of it. I knit on the front, turned the work and purled on the back, as the rest of the sweater is done.

To fasten the sides as I went along, I did the same as in the article Mending a Knit Sock (by Sarah E. White @ The Spruce), but for me it didn’t work that well – as in I somehow couldn’t make it look as even as I wanted it to be.

For the top I sew the stitches in with a row a bit above the hole, a mix of the duplicate stitch and the technique used in the video How to Repair a Hole in Your Knitting (by Cheryl Brunette).

The Back

After finishing the knitting part, I realised that there were still quite some work to do – on the back! All the loose ends had to be fastened to avoid the yarn from unravelling all over again.

To avoid a too bulky patch I purposely unravelled the middle of all the rows covered by the patch, until only some stitches were left on each side. Then out came the needle to weave the ends in.