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.

I’ve decided to take up a year-long project in which I take some time each week to mend or fix something. I have a number of reasons, the main one being that I have a lot of things right now that need relatively simple repairs that would make them more usable. I dislike throwing things away, and I need to curb my spending a bit, so making the things that I have last longer makes sense.

It will also be a way to develop some new skills and engage with some of the thoughts that I’ve been having about the unustainability of our consumer economy and the value and benefits (if any) of performing anachronistic manual tasks. Our current model for the creation and distribution of goods requires a massive input of resources and the exploitation of cheap labour often working in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. One of the easiest ways to decrease your environmental footprint is to just buy less things.

The other reason is that I experience real difficulty in committig to long-term personal projects and I’d like to force myself to be more disciplined in following through with them. I allow busyness and paid work to push my own personal projects into the margins and the result is that I have a list of things that I want to accomplish with a perpetual deadline of someday. Without committing to regular deadlines that won’t change.

I get tired sometimes of making things, at least, making things for the sake of making things. Do I really need more things in my life? Sometimes the answer is no.

I have a list of things right now in my mending pile but not enough to last the whole year. One thing I’ve noticed though is that after committing to this project I’m starting to notice more and more things that aren’t quite right in some way that I’ve just subconsciously chosen to tolerate. So they’re getting added to the list.

I’ll be tagging all the posts related to this project with #52mends so please follow along.