Repairing a hole in silk
What changes on silk. Silk is thin and often semi-transparent, so a backing patch shows through and a darn puckers the drape that makes the garment worth repairing.
The method for silk
- 1Check whether it is a hole or seam slippage. Slippage is restitched at the seam and is the easier of the two by a wide margin.
- 2For a small clean tear along the grain, a ladder stitch in silk thread closes it almost invisibly.
- 3Fusible interfacing is a last resort here: it stiffens a patch of fabric whose whole value is that it moves.
- 4For anything with fabric missing, this is French reweaving, which is specialist and expensive.
- 5Price the repair against the garment before starting. On silk that calculation goes the wrong way more often than not.
What ruins it
No iron-on patch, no machine darning. Both leave a stiff, shiny rectangle that is more visible from across a room than the hole was.
The general case, and what it costs you
The general method, the detection notes and what this does to a garment's resale value are on the holes and tears page.
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