Occasionally it is useful being a knitter who prefers top down socks and kitchenered toes.
Before Christmas my neighbour came to the door with a brown paper carrier bag and a hopeful expression. He had been to a show at Hopetoun House, and had seen a bargain, a completely gorgeous 100% alpaca piece of drapey cardigan-like wrappyness, yours for the normal price of £135 and his for £30 because of this.
A nine stitch wide hole.
Bearing in mind that this garment was knitted in fine yarn I was doubtful whether I could repair it, but I smiled confidently and offered to try and see if it could be done.
First I captured all the live stitches onto sewing thread and then repaired the laddered columns. You can see in the first photo that some went back four rows. Then I threaded sock yarn through the stitches to secure them. That's the sock yarn (toddy) in the photos above. As you can see the garment-yarn is considerably finer. The hole was not much more than an inch wide, so 9st/inch.
These are 2mm Kollage square dpns.
I chose a 1000m/100g British wool laceweight and dyed it the palest stone colour I could manage. The undyed is in the skein above and the dyed yarn is below.
And then I kitchenered.
It looks a bit of a dogs breakfast. The ends were woven in to secure them.
The colour match wasn't too bad from the reverse side.
But I was unhappy that it was (to my eyes) so glaringly different from the right side.
The other problem was that it looks rather uneven. I'm not sure I could have done any better though because there were no ends! What I mean is, when I examined it at the beginning there was no loose yarn. Scroll back up to the first two pictures and you'll see what I mean. The hole is there, but there is no clue as to WHY it's there, no loose threads or snipped ends or fraying, just a bit of puckering on one side. I didn't want to poke about too much for fear of making the damage worse, but there was nothing trailing from the gap... and that's why I had to dye fresh yarn for the repair.
So in order to make the repair secure I had to "catch" anything which might possibly, maybe, perhaps be the wisp of a loose yarn, and incorporate it into the darn.
Fortunately the hole was inside the beautifully draping collar and also near to the back. As David (neighbour) said, someone would have to be very, very, very close to the back of his wife's neck to see it!
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