Needle Felting Instead of Darning: How to Darn Socks Using a Felting Needle and Wool

Darning is almost a lost art it seems. In our throw-away and buy-new society few take the time to repair old clothing. Socks are cheap you might proclaim! Who darns socks anymore? Well, quite honestly, hardly anyone. Darning socks in the traditional way with a needle and thread took a substantial amount of time. Darning can be accomplished much easier using needle felting though. Indeed, there is no reason not to darn a particularly comfortable pair of socks when you can do it with needle felting!

When socks are hand knitted or crocheted, darning them to repair them seems like little effort when compared to making a whole new pair! Needle felting is a quick way of binding together animal fibers and it can also be used to bind animal fibers to other fibers! You can fix up that hand made pair of socks in no time by needle felting in a swatch or wool roving or other animal fiber.

Natural animal fiber is one of the most comfortable materials available when it comes to having something next to your skin. Wool roving comes in a variety of grades and colors. You can, in fact, use unprocessed wool straight off the sheep to darn your socks! You might even decide to be particularly adventuresome and try using a unique animal fiber like llama, alpaca or even dog hair to darn your socks.

Using animal fiber to darn, or in this case needle felt, that hole in a particularly cherished pair of socks only makes sense. All you need is a felting needle, wool roving or some other type of fiber, and a foam form just big enough to fit inside the sock and darning will become fun rather than a tedious task reserved to yesteryear.

Felting needles are special needles with barbs that pull fiber together and felt it into one piece of fabric. To darn a sock using needle felting just put a piece of foam inside the sock making sure that it completely separates the part of the sock you are darning from the other side of the sock. Then pull off a swatch of wool roving or other animal fiber and spread a layer about one-eighth of an inch thick over the hole in your sock. Overlap the fiber on the sides of the hole about one-quarter of an inch and get to work darning!