MENDING A FAVOURITE JUMPER WITH SWISS DARNING
It must be about 50 years ago that I bought a knitted wool dress which I absolutely loved. Unfortunately I haven’t got any photos of it. I wore it and wore it, and part of the main body started to wear out, so I decided to unravel it, and re-knit the yarn into a jumper. This was several years ago. It was quite a long project as the yarn is pure Shetland wool 4-ply, which is pretty fine knitting. I kept to the same basic plan as the original dress, with a plain camel-coloured body and patterned bodice and square set-in sleeves, and a square neck. The original sleeves were straight cylinders, three-quarter length, so I redesigned them to taper down to ribbed cuffs. The pattern is repeated around the bottom hem as well. The colours are gorgeous and muted, and co-ordinate beautifully. I knitted it as quite a long jumper, almost a tunic in length, and it has long been an absolute favourite.
Imagine my horror the other day after I’d washed it, to discover areas where the yarn had worn so thin that in places it had actually gone into holes. I knew when I knitted it that the wool was already recycled and some of it did seem a little thin at the time. I simply could not bear to throw this garment away as worn out, so I decided to try and mend it.
Swiss darning
This is a method of darning knitwear which is supposed to result in an invisible mend. You follow the exact pattern of the knitting, working on the front surface. I found that working on the striped pattern of the sleeves was not too difficult as it was easy to see which row one was working on, but on the plain part, I found I was often wandering off from the horizontal!
Darning mushroom
I used a darning mushroom to help with this. I know that darning is way out of fashion these days, so in case you don’t know what a darning mushroom is, it’s a clever tool – it’s a dome shape atop a handle, and you stretch the fabric over the dome and grasp it around the handle, creating some tension and a smooth surface to work on. I can’t remember where I got my mushroom – I seem to have had it all my life! It’s a particularly nice one, because it’s made of wood and the handle unscrews, making it easier to store. (When we were first married, I used to darn all my hubby’s socks. I’m afraid standards have slipped these days and he just buys new ones when they go into holes!! Darning wool does tend to shrink in the wash, too, and I’m certainly not prepared to wash his darned socks by hand.)
Mending the main body
Part of the plain body where the sleeves tend to rub, just in front of the underarms, was very thin. This is where I began the repair. It’s a bit of a mess, because it was really hard to see what row I was on, and I did tend to wander off a bit. A good steam press did improve improve things a little, though. Fortunately it is not an area that is immediately visible, and one’s eye is definitely drawn more to the patterned parts than to the plain body. With hindsight, I could have run a tacking stitch along each row as I worked on it, to keep me on the straight and narrow. This would have resulted in a much neater mend.
Mending the sleeves
I have a banana box full of 4-ply yarns and scraps. There was quite a bit of wool left over when I knitted this jumper, so I was able to match the colours exactly for the repair.
Here is where there were actual holes in one of the sleeves. You can also see some places where the yarn in very thin.
Closing the smaller hole with the blue yarn.
Working over the thin blue stitches.
The invisible mend.
Working on another very thin area.
A stitch in time saves nine
I am very pleased to have caught this in time. It is much easier working over thin areas than repairing actual holes with this method. I looked at various YouTube videos and there are instructions for running parallel threads across the hole to create a basic structure to sew the new stitches onto, but I didn’t have to do this in this case.
It has been a very long and laborious process, made worse by the fact that each time I thought I’d finished, I’d discover another thin area! It is so worthwhile in the end, though, as this is one of my absolute favourite garments. There is nothing like pure wool, for working with and for wearing, and I just love the colours and patterns in it.
