Sewing : Mending a Hole in a Sock - 5 September 2024

On Instagram I’ve seen many mentions and samples of Visible Mending as against the traditional concept of invisible mending.

In Visible Mending the person doing the sewing makes a point of showing that a garment has been repaired by using many brightly coloured or colour clashing yarns or threads. In my opinion the intention is almost to boast how virtuous you are because you’re mending your clothes. Sometimes I even wonder whether or not there was ever a hole in the garment that’s been shown.

There are also many books that you can buy with techniques and inspiration. This book on Amazon for instance costs around £26 or nearly 160 Steem and it gives you many examples of visible mending stitches.

I wrote a post about an example of my ‘accidentally ‘visible’ mending here. I’m used to mending and repairing my clothes so I’ll just show you a bit what my process is :

Here’s one of a pair of shop bought socks and a couple of my tools :

Sadly this very comfortable sock has developed a hole in the heel section and I need to repair that before the hole gets any bigger. Below is one of the many You Tube tutorials on how to mend your socks :

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The video above is now 6 years old but the advice is still practical and relevant. I normally watch this channel as the advice on various topics is down-to-earth and the videos are clear. In her tutorial Laura uses a tennis ball to make it easier to repair the hole, but in my case I actually used an old deodorant container.

The photo above shows you how closely the shape of the lid resembles a darning mushroom normally used for this purpose. You can actually purchase a darning mushroom here for nearly £11 or 66 Steem.

The You Tube video below is a very brief advert on how to use a darning mushroom, and that’s how I used mine:

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The two photos below show you the hole and the blue lid through the hole :

As you can see it wasn’t such a big hole so I managed to fix it quite quickly by sewing around it first and then adding a few stitches here and there to close the hole :

_{It helps that the sock is nearly black.}

I’d say the mending is nearly invisible.

Thank you for reading !