Learning how to darn
"You won't run around in
socked feet once you have to darn your own," predicted the friend of the
family who was teaching the high-school me to sew. But I never
did have to darn my own socks because I prefer to go barefoot most of
the time, which makes socks last ages.
But I finally wore big
holes in the heels of the three pairs of soft, warm socks I've been
wearing nonstop for the last two years, and I wasn't willing to let them
go. Time to learn to darn, darn it!
This isn't a darning tutorial --- if you want an excellent one, watch this video.
But I was happy to find that darning isn't rocket science. I
turned a sock inside out, slid it over my water bottle (since the
darning egg is being used as a nest egg in the chicken coop), threaded a thick needle with thin yarn (thanks, Mom!),
and got to work. The idea seems to be to create a woven pattern
across the hole (or incipient hole), so you make running stitches in one
direction, then turn the sock ninety degrees and repeat in the other
direction. (That video will make my scanty description make much
more sense.) All told, it took about half an hour per sock to make
the hole go away.
The test came when I
donned my socks and took them for a walk. Would the heel feel
lumpy and rub? Nope, in fact the darned area felt warm and
perfect, just like the heel of a sock should. Success! Two
pairs down and one to go....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Glad to tweak people's interest!
Brandy --- I was actually just thinking of you in relation to this post this morning. "I really should write an ebook about basic mending techniques," I thought, "But I'd want to team up with someone who's more of a seamstress than I am, like Brandy."
If you do use the water bottle, don't do what I did and use it full, then accidentally unscrew the lid partway through....