Last year, I knit a pair of socks I absolutely adore. They’re my mini-monkeys, my cute lacy socks with a hemmed cuff that I love. Jimi chewed a hole in the sole of one of them.
I remembered, though, that my dear mother-in-law Verda McFarlane, gave me her darning basket when she moved from her big house to a smaller apartment. The basket has two darning eggs, two wooden hoops, a pack of needles and a number of spools of thread.
Verda taught home economics in high school and raised four boys. She knows how to do everything.
I didn’t want to bother her for darning advice, though, because the time I set aside to do it was late at night. So I tried the next best thing – YouTube. This video demonstrates darning with extreme thoroughness. The makers don’t really edit at all. They just tape a woman darning a huge hole in a sock. You get to see every stitch and it lasts about ten minutes (but they have cute English accents, so that helps).
It worked, see? You can see where the darn is – I don’t know if darns are supposed to show or not? I suppose with self-striping yarn it would be tough to match the colors. But it’s not bumpy on the bottom and it doesn’t have gaping holes. I have my mini-monkeys back. Thanks Verda!
Below are the darning tools. Note that the pack of needles cost 15 cents!
tags:projects
