A little repair project

Hello, everyone.

Things have been a little bit busy. One reason is the subject of this post: a repair on a knit dress.

I love my Icebreaker merino-blend knit dress. Unfortunately, one day I tried to pick it up with a snaggy, sharp fingernail. Oops. A collection of very obvious holes appeared in the front bodice area.

I looked around on the internet and tried the one knit-holes repair I saw listed. It might have been all right for the back hem or someplace out of the way like that. This was to seam the edges together with the best match in an all natural thread that is around. It made glaringly obvious linear lumps on the front bodice.

So I got the seam ripper out and took the stitches away as well as possible. This was going to need a back patch, I decided, and baseball stitch. Or some reasonable facsimile of baseball stitch.

The back side of the patch, showing some basting stitches as well.

Got an old pair of pantyhose (washed) and cut a chunk out of one leg. This is the thin part of the knit, not the thick part near the waist. Basted it, two layers thick, onto the back of the dress fabric with some random thread. Put the reinforced area gently into an embroidery hoop and used the same (not quite matching) charcoal colored DMC floss to stitch the edges of the holes down and to each other as well as possible.

The front side of the patch.

After the patching stitches, the dress came out of the hoop for a while. I got out some new embroidery stabilizer: Stick n Stitch. This is a stick-on and dissolvable stabilizer. They claim you can run it through your ink jet printer but I really wasn't looking to make something that complex and heavy with stitches.

The traced daisy. I used a temporary marker pen.

Traced a daisy from the Dover Publishing floral designs book in the cabinet onto the soft (not paper) side of the stabilizer, pulled the paper backing off, and stuck the stabilizer down onto the knit. Put the hoop back on  carefully.


Stitched the daisy and a couple of leaves onto the fabric, using wool thread. (It may be tapestry thread, but the weight looked right.) I used a tapestry needle to do this, on the theory that if one uses a ball point needle to sew the knits, one should probably try to use a ball point needle to embroider them.

The threads of the flower.

Progress on the front side.









Stitches used: leaf stitch (?) for the leaves, with one strand of the Floralia. Stem stitch for the petals. Cross stitches scattered for the center of the flower. These last both in the Felicity's Garden thread.



Ready to soak:































After soaking and drip drying, the finished repair.

 The double layer of pantyhose knit seems to have worked out well for the patch behind the fabric. It has similar stretching characteristics, which matters on this kind of thing, and the dress is a thin knit so a thin patch was needed.

The Stick n Stitch worked reasonably well for a stabilizer and pattern transfer, but probably does a bit better with either a smaller needle or a crewel (sharp) needle to pierce the fuzzy stuff. I was careful not to tighten the thread tensions too much. And this dress being now even more delicate, will get hand washed from now on I think. But I love my Icebreaker tank dress. It's so comfortable and packable.