Saturday, September 5, 2009

Reason 437 to have a big stash

Yesterday was the exciting day when my distant (as in, living in England) and much-loved cousin came to visit.

I baked muffins, put out a tablecloth, and got my favourite teapot down from the cupboard. She came bearing books, as well as an exceptionally beautiful fine-gauge sweater with a tiny hole in it. She was planning to have it fixed but wondered whether I might have some yarn that would match the colour.

Might I?

Oh please, dear reader. Once you fall for variegated yarns it's pretty darn near impossible not to have a yarn that matches every colour imaginable.

I found the perfect match in Twisted Fiber Art's 'Ember', and the perfect weight in my skein of it in Arial (yes, I bought it in two weights, it's a great colourway, don't tell me you haven't bought excessive amounts of yarn too, etc.)

Then I read the label on the sweater: silk/cashmere/wool. And I, forgetting that probably she could find a more experienced mender than I, was about to mend it with superwash wool.

Well, I thought, I'm really only adding a tiny smidge, and I went ahead while she wasn't looking.

On my first try, I made the hole much bigger, at which point I panicked and separated the two singles to make the yarn thinner.


On the second attempt, I discovered that a single of Arial is just as fragile as the roving I keep splitting when trying to spin. I pulled very gingerly on the needle after that.

Then I thought - shouldn't I be doing this with duplicate stitch? Or at least something a little more organized, as described in this article from Knitty? But I quickly put this aside, seeing as how I was already in so far over my head.

The end result is a little lumpy, more so on the inside than the outside, and it definitely does not look anonymous, but I'm not sure whether I could have done any better without a tiny thread of silk/cashmere/wool and a matching needle.


And hey, the colour is perfect!

Oh, before I forget - that's the plastic casing for a camera's memory chip thingy holding my darning needles, there. Isn't it adorable and practical? Does discovering this use for it redeem me from being horrible at actual darning?