The sweater the dog ate...

There was a time in my life I lived in a rural off-grid cabin without running water. That means I peed under a tree and took a shower in town. But it was a good time and the stars were very very bright. Through a rather surreal plot twist, a friend from that time came back into my life because, well, she is in the same PhD program as my wife (I didn't marry the rural cabin owner. I'm okay with a composting toilet, but I found that I really like a shower every day a lot more than I thought I did).

And I'm immensely glad to have her back. Kelsea is a knitter. She made this fantastic sweater. Her favorite sweater. And then she took care of a dog who decided to eat one of the buttons. He swallowed the button (it wasn't found) and chewed a large hole in the yarn underneath in the process.

This is the initial mess with a few live stitches picked up.

I wasn't sure I was up to the task of repairing this. I am a fiber junkie, but I don't have the best knitting skills. I am kind of a stockinette or garter stitch sort of knitter. Sometimes I'll throw in an ssk or a yo, but really, I like it pretty simple.

This repair required picking up live stitches, reknitting a portion (I didn't have the pattern), and then Kitchener stitching the rows of live stitches together--and I had to do it backwards! I also had to secure four rows worth of severed yarn and reattach the new knitted fabric to the rest of the ribbing. I suppose the very best way to fix this would have been to rip out the ribbing back to the hole and reknit the whole thing, but I didn't have the pattern, I don't have the same knitting tension as Kelsea probably does, you would have been able to tell the difference between the older worn sweater and the new yarn, and basically I'm lazy about this kind of thing.

But I was gifted two marvelous bags of fleece from my favorite local shepherdess in exchange for this repair, and I was determined to save the favorite sweater.

So here it is.

Thank goodness that button is big. Since the button that went through a dog's digestive track was not found, this one was moved from the collar.

This project was one in the pile of UFO's which I spoke about in the Love the One You're With blog post. I'm making good headway on that pile. My bedroom floor has been a veritable sea of blocking.

Stay tuned for the last in the James Koehler videos tomorrow.