Mending a Favorite Sweater

I’ve had this mauve-y pink sweater for something like 12 years now, I think. It was a handmedown from my cousin after a closet clean-out, along with a few other sweaters and cardigans that I still have to this day. It’s a little unusual for a cozy sweater as it’s made of 100 percent cotton, but it’s surprisingly warm. It became a fast go-to layer in my wardrobe, and even travelled with me to Germany to visit my now-husband back in 2012 when he was there for work.

In Chiemsee, 2012. Taken by my husband.

The sweater already had some trouble spots before I wore it over and over again, especially at the neckline and sleeve cuffs. The main issue, I think, is the sweater’s original construction. It’s machine knit in panels – front, back, and the sleeves – but the panels are then serged together with regular sewing thread instead of knit or crocheted together. I think this really effected the strength and longevity of the seams.

The original neckline had a simple single crochet trim in a slightly contrasting, also cotton yarn, but it was heavily worn away and broken in some areas. Thankfully, the neckline was serged underneath the trim, but it should be noted that even that is not a long-wearing, secure way to finish a knit neckline.

The sweater also had a snag that left a fairly large hole, just above the upper left breast of the the front panel. (You can see it in the above picture if you look closely about two-and-a-half cables away from the left sleeve seam.) This was poorly “fixed” with a quick and untidy piece of yarn that did not close up the hole, but kept it from getting worse. At some point, I re-mended this and it’s pretty much unnoticeable now.

With all the regular use I got out of this sweater for so long, it might be surprising to find out it sat on my desk in a state of mid-mend for over a year. When I started mending the neckline then, I pulled out the old, broken crocheted neckline trim and started a new simple single crochet trim in a similar pinkish cotton yarn from my stash, taking cues from the original neckline trim. But somewhere along the way I put the mend aside unfinished. I think maybe the weather warmed up and the project didn’t seem as urgent, and then all the coronavirus lockdowns began and well, there didn’t really seem to be a need for a layerable sweater to wear out when we weren’t really going anywhere.

About a week and a half ago I had the idea to finish mending the sweater in preparation for an at-home anniversary date with my husband, with a plan to wear it with a skirt he likes that I used to wear often with this sweater when we were dating – in fact I just realized it’s the skirt I’m wearing in the picture from Chiemsee above! A sort of throwback outfit that I thought would be cute. In a way, waiting this long to finish the mend actually worked out for the better, because I decided that I had been adding too many crochet stitches and the neckline was quite stretched out and didn’t lay the way I wanted it to. So I frogged the work and redid it with less single crochets, and the final neckline now looks much more similar to the original.

The ends of the sleeve seams just at the cuffs were pulling apart thanks to the serged thread snapping in places, along with the un-reinforced knit edges coming undone. I used some of the same yarn from the neckline to whipstitch over these areas, pulling each side of the sleeve seams together and reinforcing them. I didn’t want to get to fiddly or tedious here and strengthening the seam ends was my main goal. The stitching is not visible from the right side of the fabric, so it looks fine.

Bonus: The sweater featuring in an old outfit inspiration post from the early days of the blog, in 2014.

Hopefully these mends help this sweater last much longer in my wardrobe, as I’m loving being able to wear it again. Sadly, though, I can feel that the fabric of the sweater is thinning and wearing out, and as mentioned, the seams being serged instead of knitted makes them weaker. Hopefully I can mend it as needed to keep it in rotation for a long time.

PS. I loved the shape of this sweater so much, but knew of it’s wearing out ways a few years ago, so designed this sweater pattern to be shaped like it!