Tailoring & Clothing Alterations - How to repair a moth - Eaten sweater

Hi, I'm Deborah DeMirza, and I'm a Deluxe, a resale clothing boutique in Eugene, Oregon, and today I'm going to show you how to mend a moth hole in a sweater. And what I do is find matching thread if you have thread that's close but not totally matching you would go with a shade a little darker rather than a little lighter. And the reason for that is the darker shade makes it blend in more like a shadow. If it's lighter it makes it stand out like a light bulb. So I have thread that pretty much matches and what I do first, I do three little tiny loops of thread just real tiny, you don't want to use a knot because knots can wear off. And this also locks your thread into the fabric and if it's open weave your knots will just go right through. So I always use just the three little loop method. Pull it taut but not so tight it's going to pull right out. And then once you have that third little loop it locks it in, it won't go anywhere. Then you can clip the little pieces of thread off that where you began it. And then I look for the areas that have been unraveling, you'll notice that when you see a little chain stitch that will keep unraveling, so what I'll do is kind of go in with my thread and lock those in place first. Just by doing a little loop into the loop of that little line of weaving. And I'll look for other ones that like on the other side there is one too. So I'll go in there and try to catch the threads on that side and then what I do is just kind of pull those together, not so it bunches up but just draws them together, and then I just work - I find that when I do this on the outside I have a little more control on how it's going to look. I usually do sewing from the inside but for some reason it's looks better on the outside when I do it this way. So what you want to do is just go across each row and if you can just get them lined up, just so it has a neater line and it continues the line that was already there. And then you might have to do it a few times to catch the threads that aren't broken. And then you can go - I go to the side and catch a little bit of that side thread. And that's where you can go kind of underneath to go over to the other side, so that big piece of thread doesn't show. So I go back through there and then slide it underneath and then start over on the other side here. And again you're going to go across kind of continuing the line of the pattern of the fabric. You won't get it to totally disappear, sometimes you'll have that luck and it'll totally disappear into the rest of the fabric, but a lot of the times it will show a little bit. And then again I just go across underneath it and go over to where there's a little sideways hole. And then just kind of repair that by going sideways through there. You just want to draw it all together. And then you finish it up by just doing your three tiny little loops, just catching a few little threads but not real close to the hole 'cause that will unravel the hole more, and then clip the thread and that's how you repair a hole in a sweater.