The Personal Satisfaction of Darning a Pile of Holey Socks

This week, as we near the end of 2025, the writers and editors of KQED Arts & Culture are reflecting on One Beautiful Thing from the year.

“Y

ou’re entering your homemaker era,” my mother said earlier this year, mostly joking.

She’d been teasing me for finally getting into cooking about 20 years later than I probably should have, as a self-sufficient adult. For too long, I’d done the bare minimum, more of a “combiner” of ingredients than a chef de cuisine. Sometimes, on long walks or bike rides, I’d marvel that I was actually able to keep this body moving and in semi-good order, considering how little care I put into feeding it.

But it wasn’t just that I’d graduated from chief dishwasher to chief dinner-maker. My mother was astonished by my mania for darning my household’s socks, something even she — a woman who once sewed her own clothes and makes an incredible beef bourguignon — absolutely does not do. She looked at me as if I might be a pod person.

I didn’t get into darning out of any nesting impulse. It was probably the Oakland artist Kate Rhoades who most inspired me to pick up a needle and thread. Her dedication to visible mending is ad hoc and colorful, a true delight.

Kate’s patched and mended clothes have character. And thanks to my very capable mother, I knew how to thread a needle. I watched a YouTube tutorial and made my first attempt.

It snowballed from there. I bought a book, mastered the first few approaches and left the more advanced techniques to others. The basket weave is my jam: an orderly, square grid of warp and weft, under and over. It sturdily bridges a hole, buying purchase in undamaged fabric and sealing off loose ends. The fun comes from combinations of colored thread, patches that contrast against the surrounding material, or else the challenge of making a mend as invisible as possible.

Eventually, I worked my way up to shirts and sweaters. (I’m still building the confidence to mend jeans.) But socks, the original low-stakes testing ground, remain my favorite thing to darn. Thankfully, holey socks are an endlessly renewable resource. As soon as one hole is covered, or a thin zone reinforced, a toe will poke through elsewhere. So long as we wear socks and walk around this hard-crusted city, we will rub away the material that provides comfort and protection, step after step.

This is a hobby that requires very little in the way of equipment. In the early days, I used a soup ladle, stretching socks over the rounded scoop to create a stable surface to stitch against. (While I have been cooking more elaborate dishes, there hasn’t been much soup on the menu.)

Material experimentation is inexpensive. I tried out embroidery floss (too thick and brittle), sewing thread (too thin, had to double it up) and eventually landed on bobbins of wool reinforcement thread. Also a favorite: cotton sashiko thread, which comes in variegated strands that add an element of chance to the whole endeavor.

As my obsession progressed, I found myself shopping at San Francisco’s ImagiKnit. A punny business name tells you you’re on the right track: peak enjoyment, zero striving, comfort with the built-in cringe.

Whenever I finished a darn, I would send close friends pictures of myself grinning maniacally, holding up a socked foot to show off a freshly mended heel. Soon, their accolades via chat weren’t enough. I began talking about my newfound love in public. After I mentioned it in an artist talk, a kind person even gifted me a wooden darning egg, passed down through their family.

The hobby really kicked into high gear with a small, handheld loom, a birthday present from a dear friend. This thing is next level. A darn that might have taken me over an hour is now done in 30 minutes. My mends have gotten tighter, even more uniform. The pile of holey socks dwindles with astonishing rapidity. I find myself inspecting clothes more closely while folding laundry. Is this pocket coming unstitched? Is this heel getting thin? It couldn’t hurt to preemptively reinforce it …

I have become, I fear, a bit insufferable. “Look what I did!” I say to my boyfriend, thrusting a sock in his face. “I know. I watched you do it,” he replies.

I desperately want to share with others the personal thrill that comes from completing a mend — of making an unusable thing useful once again. Yet only I am doing that work; the thrill is decidedly nontransferable. What is this impulse, then?

We worry about our screen time, we install app limits and buy Bricks and sign up for Phone-Free February. We try to distract ourselves from time-sucking, glowing devices by doing things with our hands. In-person experiences are up, workshops are full, people want tangible skills in an intangible world. And darning can absolutely be one of those skills, with the added benefit of keeping clothes in circulation and out of the waste stream.

Darning is also teaching me to enjoy a private, personal satisfaction. Concealed within shoes, undetectable (I hope) to feet, these are functional fixes. Each mend contains its own small beauty, but it’s a beauty glimpsed only by those wearing the socks.

Slowly, I’m getting rid of this impulse to share it all — she writes, doing just that. Well, two steps forward, one step back. It’s a good thing more friction means more mending.