The humble darning egg (with a personal history)

For about a year now I've been looking for a darning egg in antique stores.  I initially was going to just buy a new one, but I decided I wanted one with a bit of history. I  have found plastic ones,wooden ones, and even one was hand painted.  But alas, I just couldn't find one that I wanted to go ahead and get...scratch that...the hand painted one was awesome, but it must have been used by some famous sock darner because they wanted an insane amount for it.

So the search continued...last spring I found the perfect egg and walked out of the store after absent mindedly setting it down to thumb through some vintage patterns, oh well.

To my surprise, I was gifted the other day by the women in my family (they had no idea I was looking) my very own darning egg!!  What a cool coincidence!  The knitting gods were smiling down on me that day!  The best part is that it was used by my grandmother and upon closer inspection I found it has nicks and dings all over it from when she would darn my grandfather's socks...very, very cool.

So after looking for the perfect darning egg, it found me...and with came it's own history and is a part of my history too.

My grandmother's darning egg

PS Here is an excellent video tutorial on how to repair a sock using the tool (the person in the video used a darning mushroom, but according to Wikipedia they are interchangeable.

How to Darn A Sock

Wikipeda link on Darning

(From Wikipedia)