Featured Artifact: Darning Eggs

The objects from the Benton County Historical Museum's collection which are pictured below were once common to most households. I wonder how many would have one today. 

The objects are darning eggs. 

In the past, clothing was time-consuming to make and relatively expensive to buy so instead of discarding clothes, people mended them. Darning was a way to repair holes in the fabric. The mender used a needle to attached threads across the hole and then weave the thread through them to fill the space. If the thread matched the original fabric, the patch was not very noticeable. This method is often associated with repairs to knitted objects, especially socks. 

Making this repair required the fabric to remain taut. To do this, darners began inserting smooth objects such as gourds, shells, oranges, or round pieces of wood under the work area. By the mid 1800s, machine -made wooden darning eggs such as the black one were readily available. Some were egg-shaped and some, like these, had handles. Some were polished wood; others were painted in various colors or designs. The ecru darning egg is made of a composite material. Today, many are plastic. Although round or oval shapes are most common, mushroom shaped objects were common in some places. 

These darning eggs would be too large to use in repairing holes in gloves or other small items so manufacturers produced specialized glove darners. 

Darning, a once common task for women, began to disappear as manufacturing developments made clothing cheaper and more women entered the paid labor force. My mother, a child of the Depression, taught me how to darn. I might still have a darning egg but I can't remember the last time I used it. I find other ways of reusing holey socks. 

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon