Part
of me is horrified by my results. I don't mind telling you that the
sweater cost a fortune. Well, I do mind telling you because, on the
basis of my fixing skills, it is now worth fuck-all. Admittedly I "practiced" on
the most expensive piece of cashmere I own - expensive because a) it's
very good quality fiber and b) it's a long cardigan - like a jacket more
than a sweater. How I allowed this poor garment to get hole-y is a travesty.
(I've
got an excuse for that, btw, I wore it constantly - till I tired of it - and then it languished in the closet for 3 years. During
that time, we had a brief moth incident. Note: Said incident doesn't seem to have
persisted and most of the affected sweaters were mended professionally quite a while ago.
This one was overlooked, in addition to one other which is SO hideously
affected, I think it's only good for pitching. What a terrible
reflection of my (former) cavalier attitude.)
I've
mentioned that I am taking a new attitude towards a) reviewing clothes
regularly for signs of wear b) mending and c) caring for knits of all
kinds.
I no longer dry clean anything that can possibly be washed - or that will touch my skin - because those chemicals cannot be good for me and, in truth, they don't clean anything. Sweaters LOVE hand washing, peeps. They love your care. They love to be gently swished in a bowl of tepid water with high-quality liquid soap (that doesn't strip their oils). They love to get a drop or 2 of, nice-smelling and bug-repelling lavender or eucalyptus essential oil (the good stuff, not synthetic!). They love to be rinsed without agitation and then gently squeezed (not rung), to get rid of excess water. Then, simply roll them in a towel (shape briefly before doing this), dry them flat on another towel, blocked into the size and shape you prefer. A day or 2 later they're soft, lovely-scented, bug-repelling, chemical-free and clean. BTW, that process takes 10 times longer to write about than it does to actually accomplish.
But
back to darning...
I think it's important to observe the likelihood of developmental opportunity when you try something new. It's important to be happy that you're learning and trying. It's important that you achieve the desired outcome (if not perfectly). On those accounts, my darning has been successful.
However,
if your idea of good darning is to create a fix that looks
somewhat better than 100 times worse than the (admittedly weak-point)
booboos then, in truth, I may have failed.
Why
did I start with a fine sweater? Well, I only had 2
garments that needed mending. This one needed less mending than the
other and I had better mending yarn to work with. Also, the sweater I started
with has a much bigger gauge, relatively, than the other machine-knit sweater, tiny
though its stitches may be. I know, from experience, I'm not going to
practice on test fabric. (It's actually pretty hard to fake-mend if you
don't have stuff on hand that's damaged. Everything really is its own beast.) I also know that this sweater
was going to be hard to fix invisibly, for anyone. The holes were too
well-developed. That's my rationale, anyway.
There are 2 ways to fix
knits, so I've seen, and Sockupied (a ridiculously titled, online mag you can get here) describes them clearly both in words and with accompanying video.
Seriously, the techniques provided apply to all knit garments and that mag
is worth its price tag for this tutorial alone.
In
brief, Method 1 is "regular" darning - wherein you hand stitch a little
frame around your hole (3 good stitches away from the hole on each side
of it). Then weave into one leg of each undamaged stitch, laying the
thread over the hole as you come to it and, once you've completed this in one direction
(aka horizontal), do it in the opposite direction (aka vertical). As such, you weave over and under the threads previously laid atop the hole. This
creates a little pot-holder-stitch. It's not invisible, it doesn't
reconstruct the stitches, but it does produce a strong, stable mend that
- in the same yarn - will look ok.
The
second sort of mending is actually reconstructing the original fabric
and, seriously, it's complicated. It's referred to in the magazine as "reknitting", Swiss darning and duplicate stitching and it looks something like this:
 |
| Swiss Darning pic via Chestofbooks.com |
I won't even try to explain it, though
Sockupied does, very
well, but after creating the stabilizing thread frame around the hole
(mentioned above but not shown in the illustration), you actually use a double strand of regular thread to
create a kind of loom over the hole. Then you weave into and out of one
strand of the "loom" thread, stitch-by-stitch re-knitting with a
darning needle. If worked in the same yarn, it is utterly
indistinguishable from the original garment and it has the same
properties of stretch.
I
chose to work the simpler method on my sweater because a) after watching the reknitting video 12 times, I still couldn't wrap my brain
around it and b) the gauge of my sweater's stitches were SO tiny - and the holes so small - that I didn't think I'd be able to finagle a loom. I still think
that. (The videos show mending on chunky yarn that had been hand knit
so, of course, it is relatively easy to make the fixes on that fabric.)
Alas,
my technique is nascent and unsophisticated. In the day, I'd have
learned this skill from childhood and, by now, I'd have darned hundreds
of garments. As it is, I'm going to need to practice and some of the
garments on which I need to practice will be sub-optimal for that activity because they are very dear. Oh well, that's how the
cookie crumbles. I will choose to look at my darning as a work in
progress. I will learn to love it for its pragmatism, despite its
quirks. And, moreover, I will improve.
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