Disaster, Darling

Remember the green Kimono Jacket? I took it off the other evening and there it was:



Arrgghh!

But I have the solution - a little pamphlet by Rena Crockett (who I imagine in the Wild West, planting seeds, raising chickens, making and mending). It's called Flawless Knit Repair and it walks you through the process.

First, remove the stray bits of yarn:



Then pin to a backing fabric:



Unpick carefully, so you have some yarn to weave in at the end.



The yarn will be all kinky (as you see, above), so you can steam it carefully to straighten it.

Stabilize the hole with contrasting sewing thread:



Weave the new yarn (which you have carefully preserved from the time when you knit it in the first place) under and over the sewing thread:



Use a crochet hook to recreat columns of stitches:



Kitchener each stitch to the corresponding loop at the top of the column.

Here we are partway through:



The tension is looking a bit wonky (tt) but it can all be evened out at the end.

This is it at the end:



The only thing left is to close up the slits at each side and weave in the ends.

Weaving in of ends (not one of my favourite pastimes) took ages - there are two strands at each end of every row; there were five rows: twenty ends to weave in.

However, I don't think it looks too shabby:



Yes, I know, some of the stitches in the light yarn should have been purled . While it is possible to do this, and Rena Crockett explains all, I just didn't have the strength to work it out.

I pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

If you ever have a disaster, darling, there's a very good Knitty article you might want to refer to.