Monday, December 21, 2015

Fixing a Sweater Snag

So, It's been a while since I've posted anything. The reasons are kind of three-fold, 1) I've mostly been working on gifts, and I can't really post about them until the intended recipient gets them. 2) I've been really busy with work and 3) Fiance and I are in the process of moving so most of my crafting materials are packed up and not accessible to me. Moving is all kinds of not fun, but Fiance and I are trying to find a two-bedroom so with luck I will shortly have my very own room for crafting in, instead of taking over the table in the living/dining room and that will be awesome.

I've only got three post topics that are available right now, and of those only one has photos on my computer, so by default today, you get a tutorial on fixing a sweater snag.

Last year for Christmas I made Fiance a sweater (ha ha, boyfriend sweater curse be damned). It's a nice gray wool, worsted weight sweater. It looks very handsome on him, but it's fairly unsuitable for work because it snags easily. I've just picked out a new sweater pattern in a fingering weight that I'm hoping will snag less because it will be a tighter gauge. In the meantime, I keep fixing the snags on his sweater. It's really not too difficult and it saves the sweater from being "ruined."

For small snags sometimes just tugging on the fabric around the snag and/or tossing it in the wash will even out the tension, but sometimes you get a doozy of a snag, and for that you need a smallish knitting needle (I used a size 2 double point because I had one laying next time me)


As you can see in the picture Fiance managed to pull a long snag and it created a ridge along the collar line. 

Step one in order to fix this to use your knitting needle to pull on the stitch next to the snag. This will pull the snagged yarn and help you create two snag loops. Basically, what you have to do to fix a snag is redistribute the yarn across the row that has been pulled tight. It's important to split your snag and distribute the yarn to the right and left of the snag in order to fix the whole row. 


And then you are going to go along the right row and just keep pulling at the stitches, leaving them looser and shortening the snag loop as you move.


You can see in this shot and although we started with roughly equal loops now the left one is shorter than the right as I've moved to the left.


And eventually, you will run out of loop altogether.


If you find it easier you can move your loop to the front of the sweater (for normal human being it will probably start out on the front, as close as I can figure Fiance must have put his sweater on inside out). 


And with a little bit of patience, your sweater will be healed! It took be about twenty minutes to fix the snag, and that was with a lot of stopping to take pictures.


Fiance is nervous about wearing the sweater while working now because he doesn't want to ruin it, but in this case, it was an easy fix. I'm just going to have to make him another sweater though because all his others are too short and they look silly.