How to Fix a Hole in a Sweater

Spread the sweater out flat with the damage in the middle and good light falling on it. Run a needle tip around the edge of the hole. Knit fabric is one long strand looped through itself, so a hole means a few of those loops have snapped and the rest are pulling away from the gap.

Check how far the damage runs. A hole the size of a pea takes a couple of minutes. If the wool around it feels thin, the repair has to reach out into sound knitting on every side.

Ordinary sewing thread is all this takes. No yarn, and no need for an exact match. Hold a couple of spools against the knit and pick whichever one disappears fastest. Cut a length about as long as your forearm. Anything longer tangles on itself while you work.

Repair What You Wear stitches this whole repair in bright yellow, which is for the camera rather than the sweater. She switched to a contrasting color after viewers said a matched thread was too hard to follow on screen.

Turn the sweater inside out so the purl side faces up, the side where the knit reads as rows of small bumps. Every stitch happens here. Working from the back keeps the thread buried in the thickness of the wool instead of sitting on the surface.

Begin about half an inch away from the hole. Take the needle under the back of one loop and wind the thread around it two or three times. That holds the thread with no knot. Do not push the needle all the way through to the front or the color will show.

Look at the knit right beside the gap. The strands running up and down are the vertical loops, the chains of the knitting, and those are what you rebuild. Slide the needle under one of them at the edge of the hole and draw the thread through.

Where a loop has visibly split, catch that one. Bring the needle back out a loop further along and keep every stitch shallow so it stays inside the wool. The thread moves through the fabric, not over the top of it.

Take the thread up across the hole, catch a loop on the far side, then come back down into the loop next along on your own side. That up and over and back down path is the entire repair. Every pass brings one more pair of broken edges together.

Vary the length of the passes to follow the shape of the hole. A tear is rarely round, and short stitches at the narrow end with longer ones across the middle stop the mend puckering into a point.

With the vertical loops caught, go back across the mend using the horizontal loops, the small bars that run side to side between the chains. Pick them up the same way, needle under the bar and out again, travelling across the repair.

This pass is where the hole really closes. Draw the thread a little firmer as you go and the two edges walk toward each other. Ease them together rather than hauling on them. Wool responds to coaxing, and what you are avoiding is a lumpy scrunched bunch sitting in the middle of a smooth sweater.

Move a short way off the mend into sound knitting and work one or two small stitches to lock the thread, the same wind-around-a-loop move you started with. Then run the needle through the back of a few nearby stitches, pull the thread along and snip it close to the wool.

Cut it flush and the tail retreats into the knit instead of dangling. Turn the sweater right side out and look. With a close color match the repair reads as a slight kink in one line of knitting and nothing more.