Mending
Occasionally I mend things. A new button on my husband's shirt or a repaired hem are things I'm comfortable with. I could replace a zipper if it was really important. Mending knitwear is something new for me. For the last 35 years we have lived on the upper Gulf Coast of Texas so not a huge need for sweaters. I have talked about my small collection of sweaters here recently. Most of the things I have knit in the last 25 years have been for sale or for gifts, neither of which will require my attention to repair.
Spin Off's winter 2021 issue has a wonderful cover full of decretive darning ideas to go with an interesting article by Susan Z. Douglas called Flexible Embroidery and Decorative Darning - Stretchy Stitches for Knitted Fabric. I like the idea of making one's repairs bright and colorful. It's the exact opposite of anything I learned in Home Economics class about making your repairs completely invisible.
Then I ran into the work of Fiona Collingwood-Norris (www.collingwoodnorrisdesign.com). She teaches several classes, all of which were virtual in 2020, about Visible Mending. So the seeds were planted in my mind. This is something I would have to try.
Then here comes our polar vortex and I have pulled all my sweaters out. They were looked at critically, tried on and sorted. Between my sweaters and my husbands, we filled a large black trash bag of useful but not to us sweaters that have now been donated.
One of the sweaters I am keeping is my fisherman knit cardigan. It's old - I knitted it decades ago - but it's still in good shape. At some point in the past I realized it had a moth hole along the edge of the collar. When I pulled all my sweaters out, I found that hole yet again but now it was time to repair it.
The sweater is a cream/beige marl yarn that I love. I have some Shetland wool that is as close to the same color as you could get without finding another skein of this same yarn. But I chose a bright red yarn for the repairs.
I fixed that hole before I wore the sweater all day on Thursday. When I put the sweater on again this morning, I found a second hole just above the waist band in the front left. Well, crap. Maybe it would be worth my time to really inspect the sweater closely to see what else I could find. Sure enough there was one more small hole along the underarm/raglan shape line.
Now all the holes are repaired and I love the contrast of the bright red with the soft cream/beige. I would even be tickled to find some other hole to be mended. I'm getting better at this!