Year: 2020

I’m on a mission to improve my ‘make do and mend’ skills, primarily because I have some really lovely bamboo socks and also some yoga toe socks, neither of which are cheap so I have taught myself the diminishing skill of darning and thought you might want to give it a try!

Note: I’ve used contrasting thread to make the process clearer. By matching your thread to your sock the darn will almost vanish. Leftover yarn works well, or you can use stranded cotton for thinner socks.

Get a nice long darning needle – a mixed pack is good for different thread thicknesses and lengths. Stretch your sock over a darning mushroom to help get your tension right and make a circle of running stitches around the worn area. Pull in gently but not enough to make puckers around the damaged area. Secure your thread with several stitches on top of each other.

Begin to sew large ladder stitches across the hole to form the warp threads.

Turn back and add a further warp thread between every one of the gaps created earlier. Secure your thread. This is where I changed colour – if you want an interesting darn or find it easier to learn with two colours then change colour now.

Starting at the top of the warp threads, begin to weave across the weft threads. Go over one thread and under the next until you reach the other side. Make a small stitch at the end in line with your running stitches. Work back across the threads in the opposite direction, reversing the over and under weave. Continue in this way, pulling the threads reasonably taut across the mushroom as you go.

Gently push your weft threads to the top as you work so you can fill as much available space with thread for a good dense fabric. When you’ve completely filled your darned area then secure your thread. Work it through on the reverse of your fabric before trimming it off.

by Purple Boots