It’s a howling gale outside tonight, so the place to be is by the fire doing a bit of mending. The subject is a pair of socks machine knitted from my hand spun yarn. These sticks are like , ‘Trigger’s broom’ from Only Fools and Horses.

I plied the yarn from singles of Alpaca and Texel fibre, but did not include any nylon. Consequently, but after a reasonable amount of wear they have begun to thin and finally the stitches have burst. First of all the big toes went, and now the heels.

I had a little of the yarn left, but now it’s onto improvised and colourful mending…

I used one of those little mending looms for the toe repair, but the heels have been done ‘freehand’ using a technique from a 1970s mending book. I bought this useful book secondhand when a penniless student in the 80s, well before ‘slow textiles’ and ‘visible mending’ became a thing. Since then, useful book has helped me extend the life of many items for reasons of economy and necessity rather than fashion. Now my mending is on trend and it’s good to see the skill encouraged by a plethora of modern books on the subject.