Thursday 1 October 2015

What I've been up to . . . pt 2

Here is something I never ever thought I'd be doing: darning socks.  Mr B's socks no less - I think that puts me in the running for housewife of the year.


 The thing is, yes, darning is a massive pain in the arse.  I think the majority of people would rather just buy a new pair of socks than spend the time repairing something so cheap.  That said, I find there is something very satisfying about taking a hole and essentially reweaving it into a new fabric.  There is also something lovely about how truly unique the construction on each pair of socks is - something I would never have noticed had I not started doing this.  I know, how different can a pair of socks be (aside from the obvious colour and pattern differences)?  But take this Calvin Klein sock above, it's stitches are a lot tighter than say the grey Reiss pair pictured at the bottom - it makes it much harder for me to run the stitches through easily.  The fibre content is clearly different too - something not so noticeable when you put them on, but somehow very evident when you're working on smaller scale.


I'll be honest though, a very large part of the appeal of this new pursuit lays in the fact that I get to use this lovely vintage darning mushroom I bought on eBay.  Isn't it a thing of beauty?


Now, I'm not really going to suggest you all start resuscitating every single pair of your socks, but for those interested in taking up the noble art of darning, I used instructions from this book which is also excerpted over at the Colette Patterns blog.  

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