Darning Sweaters in Lockdown

One of the many things I love about darning and visible mending is the focus it takes. During this time of huge uncertainty and stress, I’ve not felt able to focus on my knitting work, and instead I’ve found that mending has given me a great sense of purpose and calm.

I have probably mentioned this before, but one of the main reasons I got into darning was because I got a puppy, Stitch, who had a taste for my cashmere! She just loved pulling on my sleeves. As soon as I realised she loved sleeves, I only wore two jumpers for the first few months of having her and they ended up in a pretty bad state! I put them away to deal with later and now, almost 5 years on, I’ve had time and inclination to tackle them. Lockdown has a silver lining after all!

Stitch as a sleeve enthusiast puppy, with me wearing the navy sweater she chewed so much.

Darning my favourite sweater- Project 1

This navy sweater was once one of my favourites- I wore it all the time before I got Stitch, so it has been really nice to spend time on it and make it wearable again. As I love colour and need a bit of fun in my life just now, I opted to make each small tear into a dot of colour, using a basic darning technique.

The bigger rips on the cuffs I kept fairly simple, allowing the shape of the repair to be the main focus. I used different colours for the warp of the darn, but only one for the weft, which allows the colours to be subtly visible.

Now that this sweater has been repaired, it’s currently back to being my favourite again- I love having the fun dots of colour, and I might add more when I feel like it- either when I get a new hole, or maybe just as decoration. Dots all over the front could be fun!

Stitch died unexpectedly at the end of 2018, which broke my heart. This sweater is now a nice memorial to her love of fun. It’s a combination of her work and mine, with enough time between the two for me to enjoy the memories. That’s another thing I love about mending- it keeps the memories you have of wearing the piece alive, while moving on to the next phase you will have wearing it.

Repairing another chewed sweater- Project 2

This next sweater wasn’t one of my favourites. It was one my mum found in a charity shop many years ago, and the colour doesn’t look great on me. But its cashmere, and very cosy, so when I discovered Stitch loved to bite sleeves, I wore this sweater a lot as I was happy to sacrifice it!

As you can see, the sleeves had a lot of small holes in them, especially on one of the cuffs, and because it’s a very old piece it also had elbows that were almost worn through, and a a stain on one of the sleeves. My starting point is always choosing the colours I want to work with, and then for the elbows I marked out roughly where I needed to reinforce them.

I’ve used swiss darning to reinforce the worn areas at the elbows, creating what sort of looks like an elbow patch. These were extremely time consuming as the fabric was so fine, but I’m really happy with the results. They’re each different - they might look similar from a distance, but as I knew from the start, I’ll never be able to make them look exactly the same (worn areas are rarely in exactly the same place to start with) I always deliberately make the elbows different.

After finishing the elbow repairs, I moved on to the small holes all over the sleeves. I decided just to darn them, but create different coloured dots, as I did with the sweater above. I go through phases of what I enjoy, and right now it’s dots of colour!

The cuffs were a bit harder to mend - darning on a ribbed knit can distort it a bit, but I decided that if I didn’t warp it a bit, there would be less stretch or give to the cuff, and I like being able to push my sleeves up! The edges of the cuffs were really worn almost all the way round- I dealt with that to a certain extent, but it’s wearing in a way that won’t unravel, so for now I’m not worrying about it too much. I can always add to what I have done already another time.

As you can see above, one of the sleeves also had a stain on it near the elbow. I couldn’t quite decide whether or not to completely work over it, and decided in the end to do enough work that it will hopefully not be very noticeable.

For a while I’ve wanted to try embroidering flying birds over something, and this seemed like the project to try it. As this isn’t a favourite sweater of mine, I’ve felt quite free to just try ideas out, and not worry about it too much! I’ve used the birds to hopefully distract attention from the stain, and added more just because I can.

For now, I’m leaving it at this. I think perhaps in the future I might add a flock of birds flying across the front of the sweater, which also has a few small holes that are now dots of colour. But that will be very time consuming, and I don’t want to do it just yet. I’m going to wear it for a while and see what I think.

Even though these sweaters have been mended, I always like the thought that they may need more work in the future, and this is just one step of their journey. It is also significantly better than them ending up in landfill.

If you’d like to learn how to mend your old sweaters or other knitwear, I have put together a variety of digital mending tutorials, as well as a digital mending workshop. The workshop will teach you to darning in different ways, what to look our for when mending knitwear, and how to fix commonly made mistakes.

Alternatively check out my visible mending video package, which has darning and visible mending tutorial videos for all the techniques you can see here, including embroidery.