Emergency Mitten Repair

Late this past winter I noticed that a pair of my mittens were getting dangerously thin by my pointer finger on my right hand. (Dangerous both in terms of the structural integrity of the mitten, and, of course, frostbite.) I wasn't ready to give up on these mittens... they are soft (alpaca), pretty, and the first pair of mittens I made. Plus, I designed them myself.

Problem #1: I didn't save the leftover scraps of yarn. (There hadn't been much... but what was left I had given to someone doing a scrumble.)

Problem #2: The mittens are crochet, not knitting. (Knitting is easy to reinforce with duplicate stitch. There's no duplicate stitch for crochet. I could have done a woven darn, but that wouldn't have been as elastic.)

Problem #1 was solved through the kindness of a knitter on Ravelry. (Not the same dye lot, of course, but the same yarn and colour number.) Problem #2 was solved by an idea I had about integrating a knitted darn into crochet fabric. It worked! The look is a bit different, but the mittens are once again warm, toasty, and not in danger of disintegrating!

Here I am with the darn in progress (most dangerously thin part already darned):


Completed darn:


I had enough yarn left over that I decided to do a woven-style darn on a few other areas that were getting stretched out. Here's the main one:


There was only a wee tiny scrap of yarn left when I was done:

I don't care how small it is, I'm keeping it!

The darned mittens:

Yay!!! Thanks, frednbutter! You're my hero!