When you're planning your cuff strategy, or anywhere that needs to stretch. It's ok to add a woven darn on just part of a stretch area, such as the bottom of a sock or just part of a cuff or hem.
For example, in the sweater above, I added a woven patch along the hem. There is a bit of a trick to getting the tension right, so please read on to learn how I repaired this.
Ideally, we don't want our darning to distort the fabric. If your darning pulls in on the fabric around it, this impacts the fit and also creates a stress point where the patch is attached!
The pulling-in happens when your sweater is not properly tensioned on the work surface. If you take your darning off the loom (or darning egg, etc) and the fabric "bubbles" behind your darn, this is because your patch is actually smaller than the area you wanted to mend. I've noticed that this happens when we don't have the fabric stretched properly over the work surface.
Here is how I avoid that problem - I "pre-stretch" my garment before tying the loom on!
Exactly how much do I stretch it? You'll have to try it for yourself to get the feel for it, but if we look at my photo above, you can see I'm stretching it to about 50% of its maximum stretch. I'm not just attaching it as it sits relaxed, and I'm not pulling it as far as it goes, but my goal is to keep the fabric taught, and set my mend so that it will look and feel best the way the garment is meant to be worn.
Then, when the mend is finished and off the loom, it may look a little bit ripply like you see here:
...which I may have been able to minimize with some blocking, but when I tried this on, it fit nicely and everything laid in a natural way. That's the goal!
I also re-knit the cuffs completely, in green and pink to match the colourwork. They're cute yeah?
Lastly, here's another frayed edge! This pair of towel shorts by Picnicwear, which I covered in my previous blog post about non-stretch edges :):):)
