Darn it, what am I going to do about this huge three-cornered tear in my purple linen trousers?

(I didn’t photograph the original tear, because I didn’t have the heart.) I didn’t want to patch them, and I didn’t want to make a new pair. So I learned to darn.

Darning is using spare threads from a scrap of the same fabric to recreate missing cloth. So first you work a bunch of threads in one way, then reweave the cloth by going the other way. It’s time-consuming, detailed work – I would have been faster making a whole new pair of trousers (not as smug, though!)

From the front, with one “leg” of the tear done and the other half done

taken 16 August 2006

From the back, same point in time.

taken 16 August 2006

In theory, a darn should be invisible. In practice, this darn suffers from the amount of thread added to the texture of the cloth in the area outlining the tear. I don’t know what to do about it. Note that I melted some Wondaweb onto the loose threads at the back because I was afraid of it ravelling. It hasn’t changed the texture more than the basic darn itself did.

Front of finished darn.

taken 19 August 2006

Back of finished darn.

taken 19 August 2006