Michael and I were heading to a wedding.  We got on the Amtrak train in Washington, DC Friday night, ate dinner, worked, slept, ate breakfast, and got off at the station.  The wedding didn’t start until 4, and we didn’t have a hotel room, so I camped out in the Amtrak station to work on a sweater repair.  I got some odd looks.

Picked up stitches on circular needle, unraveling part that will be patched.

The sweater had suffered from some poor storage, and had a hole about 4″ wide about a 1/2 from the left side seam.  The pattern was a doozy: a variation of a slipped puff/bobble stitch that involved using cabled slip stitches on the wrong side.  Normally I’d try to reconstruct the fabric around the hole, but in this case, it was more time effective to pull the section out and knit a patch.

Wrapping yarn around new patch yarn to create “retroactive intarsia.”

The old yarn, since it was on the edge, was long enough that each row, as I knit back and forth, I’d work a type of retroactive intarsia, wrapping the patch yarn around the old yarn, then weaving/skimming the old yarn into the original fabric.

At one point I had more than 45 locking stitch markers in play, holding various ends out of the way, holding live stitches, marking future holes to repair, and marking where I started.

So much fun!

Detail of “retroactive intarsia.”

I could kick myself though: while I got pictures of the process, because I had to turn this project around quickly, I neglected to get pictures of the finished repair.  Suffice to say, that when I handed the sweater to my husband to take a look at, it took him a good 3 minutes to find the patch.

I call that success.