How To Swiss Darn

Swiss darning is a great way of creating a near-invisible mend in a knitted fabric. These written instructions are intended to be an additional reference that you can use alongside our Swiss darning video tutorial.

All you’ll need from your Care & Repair Kit is a darning needle and a strand of yarn. You’ll also want to use something to help you create tension across the knitted fabric – we use an embroidery hoop in the video.

It’s helpful to understand the structure of a knitted fabric, and to understand what a knit stitch looks like when Swiss darning. Each stitch looks like a little V on the front side of your knit fabric, and has a front and back leg. The top and bottom loops connect it to the next stitch on either side.

Setting up your foundation strands

The first step in Swiss darning is to set up the vertical foundation strands. These will stop any laddering and provide a structure to stitch over.

You can find full instructions of how to do this in our darning video tutorial, and a detailed diagram below of how these strands should look.

You’ll be threading your needle through the middle of the stitches in the row below the hole to be mended, and will then follow the vertical column of stitches upwards, to the row above the hole.

You’ll then insert your needle through the space to the left of the upper stitch of the vertical column, and behind the front and back legs of the stitch to the left.

Duplicate stitching your first row

Once you have your foundation strands in place, you’ll start by working a row of duplicate stitch across the first row of your mend. You can watch our duplicate stitch video tutorial to see this stitch in more detail, and we’ve highlighted this row of stitches in yellow in the diagram below.

As you work across the mend, you’ll also be duplicate stitching the stitches on either side of the hole, and along the top edge. This will create a good, strong anchor for your mend. We’ve highlighted these stitches in yellow below.

Swiss darning technique

From the second row, you’re going to be anchoring your stitches to the vertical foundation strands, while building onto the row beneath. You can see this in action in the Swiss darning video tutorial, but we’ve also detailed it below.

We hope that these instructions help you with your mending, but if you have any additional questions, please email us at info@donnawilson.com and we’ll do our best to help!

Find more mending tips on our Care & Repair page, and pick up your own Care & Repair Kit here.