So this was going to be bundled into a mega summary post for all the mending I do in 2026 but turns out it has enough to be written about on it’s own LOL.
I think this project started when we were waiting to get on a plane with my brother and he was wearing one of these and asked me if I could fix the ribbing 🤣 I was no way bro that’s so dead, but I could replace it with new ribbing. And so he said he might ask me to do that when we got back to Perth.
When he brought it over, I did point out to him if I replace the ribbing with white ribbing it won’t quite match the main sweater fabric because the colour has changed over lots of use. So he asked me if contrast colours would work, which was exactly the answer I was fishing for 😝 I sent him a bunch of options from Wattle Hill Fabrics and let him choose.
The ‘interesting’ part of this project happened on the day the fabric was meant to arrive. I was working from home and got a call from an unknown mobile number. Usually I ignore these in case they are spam calls but I feel like recently the phone operating systems updates have been quite good at flagging suspicious calls. So I answered it and a lady asked ‘Hi is this the fabric store’ and I was sooo confused 😂 I responded ‘um no, but I did order some fabric?’ and she then told me that she had found my parcel in the middle of her street while walking home and called the number on it, unsure if it was the sender or receivers number. She was so nice, she said she was going to deliver it but it was raining and she’d just returned home and she wasn’t quite sure where my street was but she knew it was nearby. So we arranged for me to pick it up off her front porch. I wrote her a thank you note and put it in her letterbox. It was so nice that she went out of her way to contact me and let me know where she lived so I could pick it up. If she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had a clue where it went and would have had to go through the hassle of contacting both the store and AusPost.
As for the actual sewing part, the first sweater I unpicked which was quite an ordeal and in the end I cut off the seam allowances because I thought it wouldn’t be very structurally sound to restitch over the same stitch line. So removing the ribbing from the second one was much easier because I just cut it off 😁
I also didn’t do any measuring before I bought the ribbing and had anticipated the ribbing being wider, so had to be very economical. The cuff and hem widths are not as wide as I planned but they aren’t that dissimilar to the original, looking at the photos side by side. Sewing wise it was nothing out of the ordinary.
I did give both front prints a press with the heat press to see if I could alleviate some of the cracking. Didn’t make any visible different to me, but I’m confident it will have helped it’s longevity at least slightly.
Categories: Sewing
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