Repairing Marion’s Elbow

I was at my part-time job a few weeks ago, and I started to notice a breeze on my elbow. I looked notice and was dismayed to see that I wore through the elbow of my grey Marion. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me again! I’ve worn through the right elbows of three sweaters in the last two months. The other were bad enough, but I knew I had yarn around for them to do repairs, which wasn’t the case with my grey Marion. Being someone who loves to vent, I went to my coworkers office to whine about it. She’s also a knitter, so I knew I’d get some sympathy , but that’s not all I got! When I walked into her office and showed her what happened, she said, “That’s worsted weight Sincere Sheep in the cumulus colorway, right? I have some in my bag.” And she turned around, fished out her yarn, and broke off a piece for me to do my repairs! Can you believe that luck? She was using a slightly different base, hers was Cormo and mine was Shepherdess, but they’re the same weight and close enough!

I wear this cardigan a ton to my office job, so it was the first I sat down to repair. That might not have been the best decision because I’m out of practice so the first half I did isn’t very neat, but oh well! I had a two-stitch-by-four-rows hole and a bunch of weakened stitches to fix and reinforce. I used duplicate stitch over the weakened stitches and extended it out over the sturdier stitches. To bridge the gap of the hole, I formed partial stitches as I duplicate stitched across a row and left them dangling to be picked up on the next row. You have to really understand the way stitches are formed to use this method, and in retrospect, it might have been easier to just leave strands of yarn across the hole and then ladder up when I was ready to join the repair stitches with the remnants at the top of the hole. Anyway, my plan was to go back and tighten up my stitches by hand when I was done, so at the time I didn’t think it mattered much, but I accidentally stitched through plies so my messy early stitches got locked in place. Oops!

It’s lumpy and bumpy, and the yarn doesn’t quite match, but it’s fixed! The repair is right on my elbow, so it’s not very attention grabbing, even if it’s not as invisible as I had hoped. And my sweater is wearable once again!