Friday Fix It: Darning Socks

I remember when the only foot wear that was in style in Singapore was slippers and.... well, that was it! It was probably more convenient (and less of a pong) to slip on the slippers and pop down to the market or hawker centre, than say put on a pair of trainers. Times have changed - I see more covered shoes, which means more socks and even more holey ones too!

In last year's The Get Redressed Challenge, I managed to try out darning socks. I had used the weaving method. Here are my sweet pink socks from the mend:

Duplicate Stitch

I was really with happy with how it turned out, and after that I decided to focus on the football socks. The holes were a lot bigger and because football socks need a substantial amount of stretching I decided to use a different method of darning - DUPLICATE STITCH. This meant replicating the same knitted stitches in the areas to be reinforced as well as in the hole. Well, it was an ambitious attempt because:

1) I had forgotten that football socks are reinforced with a lot of elastic and were a lot thicker than normal knit socks; and 

2) the knit in football socks is hideously tiny!

And so, what started off as a small project ended up being a "darn" problem! 

The initial step was pretty straight forward - define area to be mended and reinforced.

I used a jam jar instead of a darning egg and inserted it into the sock (pulled inside out). This expanded the sock making it easier to see where I needed to sew the warp strands using normal cotton thread (image below, left).

I then proceeded to do the substitute stitch..... I was only on the first row when I became extremely impatient - yes, that's right. The normally zen me was becoming frustrated. I'm not sure whether it was the needle I had chosen but the elastic in the sock was becoming an impediment to my progress! So in the end I decided to weave using embroidery thread.

In case you are wondering what duplicate stitching looks like, here is a video!

After abandoning the idea of duplicate stitching, I reinforced the weave with warp threads ie. covering the green sewing thread.  Here it is in the image below,

I continued the weaving streak with another pair of football socks. I am staying away from the duplicate stitch for an indefinite period! 

What type of darning method do you use?

This is part of the Fix It Friday series!

Don't forget to pop over to Little Did You Know and see what she's been up to with her mending.

Until next Friday!