One of the reasons I do love mending for other people is the opportunity to stitch on something unfamiliar and new-to-me. I don't often take on mending commissions, for many reasons, but sometimes I'm tempted. Especially for special pieces like this one. The bold stripes of this designer sweater sure caught my eye!
Assessing the garment
This sweater came to me in order to get a big refresh - the owner had previously repaired some holes discreetly using a needle and thread, but some more holes were appearing that he felt could use a some professional help ;) Of special concern here are the cuffs and collar that are starting to unravel.
Choosing the right yarn
We decided to go with a subtle, inconspicuous mend for this sweater. Fortunately, I had the perfect match of pink in my stash!
The tough part was matching the exact shade of navy blue. I reached out to my local knitting community to see if anyone had some scraps they would spare, and I received three options. Sadly, none was a perfect match, so I ended up custom dyeing some yarn that was close in order to bring it even closer to the exact shade of midnight blue.
Phew! Definitely fussier than I like to be, but it was a fun little exercise. Colour matching can be really difficult! Remember when garments used to come with spare buttons and yarn for mending?? The more reputable companies will still send you a bit of yarn if you get in touch, but it's becoming less and less common for it to be included with every garment.
I looked the garment over and found all the previous mends, as well as some thinning areas that the customer hadn't flagged. Whenever everything was still relatively intact, I used the duplicate stitch method of reinforcing the fabric in a discreet way. In the photo below, left side, you can see a previous mend above the pink stripe with thinning above and below. The right side shows my repair.
For the cuffs, I needed to rebuild part of the sleeve where it was looking a bit ragged. The reason I didn't do
this in blue is simply because I didn't have enough of it on hand...Fortunately, the pink edge isn't out of place. I decided to reinforce the entire cuff using single crochet all the way around, just to future-proof it and make it extra strong.
Finally I reconstructed the hem in an inconspicuous way using my colour-matched blue yarn! But I forgot to take a photo of that part. It was boring, it just looked like new. Instead, here are the finished cuffs looking cute in the sun.
Of course, all of this took longer than I had budgeted... despite knowing that things always take longer than I think it will. This is definitely part of why I don't do commissions very often. I find time tracking stressful, and don't love negotiating prices or feeling like I'm asking too much for my time. Even though this person & just about everyone else I've mended for has been super gracious and grateful. It's just extra stress I don't need, and it's not a core part of my practice. I'd much prefer to empower you to get mending instead!!!