For my first mending project I wanted to try my hand at darning socks. These ones had large holes in the heels so they were good candidates.
Darning socks fell out of favour when cheap, machine-knit socks came onto the market and it became more cost effective to throw out holey socks than to fix them. Certainly it would have been more cost-effective to replace these socks, which were cheap Christmas gift socks that I have very little attachment to. It took me a couple hours to fix them. But I enjoyed learning a new skill and there’s something about hand-sewing that I find very absorbing in a meditative way.
The most basic darning stitch results in a firm, inflexible fabric. That’s where the darning egg comes in. It stretches your stitches out pre-emptively so that they won’t end up too tight. It makes the mend look lumpy and weird but the result is surprisingly comfortable.
My stitching is a bit rough. I initially made the rows too far apart and that meant that there were gaps in the woven fabric that I later closed in with a new layer of stitching. In future I’d probably think a bit more about where I’m sticking my needle to prevent that from happening. Also, as I was working on this I started to get kind of bored with a plain 1×1 weave, especially when so much more is possible. One week I might just try out doing a sampler of cool patterns instead.
But at the rate I go through socks, these are sure to be the first of many, so I’ll have lots of chance to perfect my technique.
Should you want to also try mending socks there are many tutorials available on the internet. I used this one. I don’t have a darning egg so I used a lightbulb instead, which worked well. You can’t get incandescent lightbulbs in Canada anymore, but you can get LED ones with an incandescent shape at IKEA.
I’m repairing a thing a week in 2017. You can see all the posts about this project here.
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