Although I know how to darn socks – my mom taught me – I haven’t done it much. I tend to wear my handknit socks until they have holes, then chuck them out. This all changed when the mister had holes in four pairs of handknit socks he really loves. I had a look and decided it would be faster to fix them than knit him another four pair. (Although I’ll do that, too.)

This is the first pair of socks, when they were new.They’re knit of Patons Kroy stripe. I think the colourway is Summer Moss.

And here they are (four years later!) with the holes darned in the soles:
I actually still had some of the same yarn, but you can see that the colour had faded a bit. To repair these holes, I stitched a line of running stitch around each hole, about 1/8″ from the hole. Then I created a warp of yarn, back and forth across a hole. Finally, I wove a weft perpendicular to the warp, using the warp threads to weave a patch. I thought it might be more bulky, but the mister says it’s all good.

Here’s the second pair, which had a different challenge:
I don’t remember the yarn I used for these, but think it was a Regia sock yarn.

This pair have been around for so long that I don’t even have a picture of them newly knitted. The one on the left had a hole like the ones above, which I patched the same way. It also had an area that was getting thin, closer to the toe. You can see that I made running stitches back and forth there to reinforce it. The yarn I used to patch that sock was the same content but not the same yarn.

The toe of the right sock was developing a line of holes beside the decrease stitches for the toe, where the yarn was thinning. I did a chain stitch up the right edge of the toe, worked the yarn across the back, then down the left side, back up again (you can’t see that part so well) and down the other side again. It’s the same yarn as the sock but the bit with the brightest turquoise stripe. That made the patch feel like embroidery or embellishment. I still have to fix the hole in the sole of that sock.

I removed the pills on both pairs, which made them look refreshed as well. The top pair is back in the sock drawer and the second pair will be there soon.