My daughter came home with a hole in the elbow of her favorite wool thrifted sweater and asked me to fix it. I wasn’t very successful with my first and only knitting project back in high school and haven’t tried knitting anything since, but I understand the basic principles involved. I’ve also never darned anything before. The easy thing would have been to just use my sewing skills and sew the hole closed, leaving a bit of a “scar.” I didn’t know a darn thing about darning, but gosh darn it, how hard could it be?
I only had blue, pink, and purple yarn on hand so I “borrowed” some green yarn from a friend. I didn’t really match but my daughter deemed it close enough.
I checked with the Internet and discovered that the technique I should use is called “Swiss darning” for repair, which replicates the damaged knitting stitches. An alternative approach is to fill in the missing stitches with weaving, but Swiss darning looks much nicer. I found some online tutorials that showed how to do this using thread to provide a vertical scaffolding for the stitches. And then I found this video that offered an alternative approach that looked completely magical: https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/17gmbmd/mending_a_sweater/ (watch the 1 minute 25 second video it is amazing!) I decided to try it. It took me closer to half an hour and I did rewatch the video several times. I didn’t have exactly the right colored thread, but with a latch hook and a yarn needle I achieved something I am darn proud of on my first try! My daughter was pretty happy with it too.
And here’s what it looks like on the other side.