Oh Darn!

Of all the things that could happen to the beautiful socks my mother made me, I wore a hole right through the toe.  It's not my fault though; if they weren't so beautiful and comfortable I wouldn't have worn them to the point that the fibers simply could not hold together any longer.

But we mustn't dwell on the sadness -- we must move on towards the solution.

Darning.

And I don't mean that as an uncomfortable euphemism to suggest that we are forsaking these poor socks to a fiery end. I mean the magical and elusive skill of patching up holes so that the socks can be worn for years to come.  

The first step is to pick up stitches well beyond the frayed edges of the hole so that where you start is secure and undamaged.

As you can see, I’ve picked up 3 stitches on my double point needle, but as I knit on I will treat those 3 stitches like 6 by continuing on both sides of the loop that is the stitch.

For each row I picked up a full stitch on the side, making sure that the stitch I picked up was also well away from the worn away fibers.  This made it so that as I proceeded to knit, the picked up stitches would make it so that patch was connected to the sock on both sides.  Knitting the patch into the sock helps make it more stable and durable.  It would be a shame to go through the work of darning the sock, only to have it fall apart again.

So as you can see here, there looks to be 3 stitches on the right needle, but I would pick them all up in one stitch to bind the new stitches to the old.

To cast off I used the same principle of the sides for the stitches across the top my patch, by picking up the three stitches onto the one stitch.  Then I would cast off as normal after I picked up the stitches at the top.

All that was left to do was to run in the ends.  

Definitely not like new considering it's obviously a very different colour, but it saves the sock and helps prevent further damage from being done.  

Voila! 

I had been putting this project off for over a year.  I'm a sentimental fool and I was nervous about ruining these socks if I tried to fix them, but I also couldn’t wear them anymore in fear that I would damage them further.  It's nice doing these posts and having a little extra push to work up the courage and energy to get things done.

Thanks for joining me.

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.