It Happened Again.

As a vendor at Stitches West this past February I was excited to wear my favorite knitted pieces while working at my booth space. One that I chose was my Twigs and Willows Cardigan from my book Botanical Knits.

I have always really really liked this particular sweater and when it was no longer needed in my Botanical Knits trunk show, I quickly claimed it as my favorite! We spent many days together this past fall and winter until…

Let me first back up real and tell you a little sad story about when I was actually knitting this sweater. The yarn I chose is Brooklyn Tweed Loft which is lovely. It has held up very well over the years and rustic yarns like this are my personal favorite, buuuut the way that it is spun makes it a bit less sturdy than other yarns. This became problematic when working the cables on the yoke of my sweater. I accidentally knitted one of the cables too tight and it was puckering too much for my liking. I finished the sweater, washed it and tried to “fix” the puckering in the yoke by tugging on the cable when it was drying. And yes… you guessed it… the cable gave way and broke. After crying a little, I literally deconstructed the sweater, ripped back the button band and yoke on that one side and re-knit making sure to keep my cables nice and loose that time.

It was painful when it happened, but has since become an entertaining story that I’ve repeated several times since. It was simply an ancient funny/awful story until I took my cardigan off after a long day of vending at the show to hear an audible pop.

IT HAPPENED AGAIN.

Yep.

So this time around, I was going to need to repair the cable instead of re-knitting. Unfortunately, since this cardigan was knit approximately 7 years ago, I no longer had this yarn in my stash. At one time, I am sure I had a partial skein hanging around… but in an effort to “de-clutter” probably gifted it to someone at some point. That meant that now.. I had no yarn to match for the repair. I knew that there was a good reason for me to hoard bins and bins of yarn scraps!! See.. you should never get rid of anything.

I considered using a thread but wondered if that would slice the wool fibers over time and lead to the same exact chain of events in the future.

This was the best match I could find which really only matches the little flecks of orange fibers running through the wool.

Using a mattress stitch seaming technique I wove the stitches back together as invisibly as I could. The result isn’t “perfect” but good enough to keep wearing my favorite cardigan!

Disaster averted.. yet again!