You spend hours and hours knitting a sock, you wear them,love them, show them off with shoes chosen specially for their’ hand knit sock showing off qualities and then BAM! They spring a hole! What is a person to do? You could use the Yarn Harlot method.. shouting loudly DARN SOCKS as you stand over the trash can and dramatically toss them in.. or you could darn them.
I have a pair of felted slippers that I made that sprung a hole! I love these slippers they are warm they are comfy and really they are not all that old and I was not ready to part with them so I went out and learned a bit about darning socks!
There is a great tutorial on the HJS Studio site, and that is what I generally went by to get the job done. Here is what you need:
- A sock or other piece of knitting with a hole in it.
- Sewing thread of matching or close to matching color of the item to be darned.
- Sewing needle.
- About a yard of yarn that matches the item.
- A tapestry needle.
- A darning egg, or a light-bulb.
Basically what you do is to make a framework with the sewing thread, and work duplicate stitch on it until you have fixed and filled in the gap.
I am very glad that the slipper I was darning was felted, I am not that great at the duplicate stitch and so it didn’t look too hot. Not bad for a first try but certainly not perfect. But if it gets my slippers off the injured reserve pile and back into play? What do I care!
The tutorial I used can be found here. There is a text only tutorialat eHow, quite an interesting site.
Annie’s Attic has a little duplicate stitch tutorial, and Lucia ‘The Knitting Feind’ has a more detailed tutorial here.
If you happen to have alot of socks to darn, or just really want a darning egg they have them at Lehman’s. I love that place! It’s sort of local and they have all kinds of non-electric gadgets. (not to mention a cute quilt store that has a small cache of interesting yarns across the way!)
Well I hope you enjoyed this weeks’ How To!! Don’t forget to stop by next week when we answer the question.. just how do I use this flower loom thing.. and why oh why do those pegs keep falling out of it???
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