Old treasures, new sox, and darning

One of the traders at Region 1's Spring Regional Day - Jackie Maxwell of Grandmother's Workbox - had all sorts of "preloved" sewing-related treasures, gleaned from here, there and everywhere. Nostalgic and irresistible.

I was excited to find a darning mushroom - but it's too big to fit into the toes of my dainty Falke kneesox. What's needed for those is a sock darning egg like this one:

Searching for a link to my fave sox, I discover that the 65% cotton knee highs come in other colours than black - and that you can easily get all-cotton sox online, rather than having to constantly revisit John Lewis because they have your size, or your colour - but not both.

This online discovery entirely makes up for the disappointment of the darning mushroom. Indeed, it makes it superfluous -- what, these days, is worth the time-investment of darning? Yet there was a time when textiles were precious and darning was an important skill - which was learned through "darning samplers":

Pattern darning is part of several ethnic embroidery traditions (Japan, the Ukraine, and the Punjab, for instance), and can be difficult to distinguish from weaving - indeed one variant is called huck weaving. This kimono design is called kagari, the Japanese word for darning: