How to fix a hole in your sweater.

I’ve been putting off updating because I’ve been lazy, but also because I was trying to decide if I wanted to talk about the hole in the sweater that I fixed and how much of it. With the help of some Plurk friends, I decided I’d show you what I did to fix my sweater! (Fair warning, this will be a photo heavy post!)

So about a year ago now, when I was moving all my stuff out of the ex’s house, I found my beloved Rogue sweater, which had been folded up in my craft room, had two holes in it. To say I was devastated would be an understatement. I was absolutely crushed by it. This was the first sweater I’d made for me. (The first sweater I made was Folly for my mom, which needs a different collar so she’ll wear it more.) I love this sweater and I had no idea how to fix it. Plus, at the time I was too heart broken about it to figure out how to fix it. It has sat in my stash for all this time, just waiting for me to get up the courage to try and repair the hole. I still have no idea what caused the holes in the first place. It really just looks like the yarn wore down in those spots.

Over the weekend, I was cleaning up my stash area and found the bag it was in with the extra yarn. I decided it was time to fix it. I sat down and looked at it. I decided that ripping out the row(s) and re-knitting would be the best way. There were two places there were holes, so I did one at a time. I started with the “worse” one.

Here’s the sweater:

Here’s a close up of the hole if you can’t see it that well in the above picture:

First thing I did was unravel enough of a hole so that the yarn bits were long enough to weave into the back of it.

At this point, though, I noticed there was another hole quite close.

Noticing this, I did some swearing, took a deep breath, and ripped another hole so I could fix this, too (might as well, right?).

I don’t have a decent picture of how I closed this up, but since it was only one row that I unraveled, I simply grafted it together. Yes, I’m crazy enough to just have the live stitches and graft them together. It’s similar to doing a kitchner and knowing how the stitches connect together, it wasn’t too hard to figure out (though it did take me a minute to get right). Here’s how it looked after I grafted it back together:

After that went smoothly, I tried to do the bigger hole, but it was late and it came out pretty awful. I put it down, quite frustrated, and went to bed, set to work on it the next day. I ended up dreaming about it and what I needed to do to fix it! So, the next day, I sat down, set to fix this sweater. I pulled out what I had done so that I had the live stitches back on a needle. Then I knit three rows. I did this by using a different piece of yarn for each row so I was only knitting across the stitches, but not back the other way (purling):

Next, I bravely took the needle out and grafted the live stitches together (last row, for 4 total rows “re-knit”). I got better shots of how I did this the second time around.

Here’s how I started:

If that’s not too clear with the stitches, let me show you how it looks with a little work done in Paint to show the path of the stitch:

I started by going up through the bottom of the first stitch, then up through two loops (first one through the front, second one through the back), then back down into the first stitch and into the one next to it from the back of the stitch. Above, I was working on the second stitch. Up through two loops, down through two loops, always in through the front on the first stitch and in through the back on the second stitch. Here’s what the needle looks like on the bottom (down) stitches:

Do this all the way across and it now looks like this:

Here’s what the back looks like (oh all those ends!):

After sewing in all the ends, I started on the second hole.

I ripped out a bigger hole:

This time when I knit it back up, though, I did it a little different. I knit one row and purled the second row. I think this worked out about the same as the “use new yarn each row” method, but was a slight bit harder to sew together and make neat (was a bit more fiddly).

After I did that, I was ready to graft it together, using the same method I used above. Once it was grafted, it looked like this:

I sewed up the remaining ends and here’s views from the front and back:

I was a little worried about how it looked, even after I was “done.” I hoped that it would look much better after a good washing and blocking! I think it definitely looks better after, but I’m not 100% happy with the first one I did because of the way I crossed/twisted the yarns when I was weaving them in on the back side. I did it differently on the second hole and that part looks better. I am satisfied with how it turned out overall, especially it being my first time doing this! In this picture you can see a bit of a line where the first “fix” I did was, but can’t really see any sign from the second one:

My sweater is now wearable again!! I don’t think it was as hard as my brain made it out to be and now I won’t be so scared to do this should it ever happen again.