Working from home, I wear woollen socks a lot more. Working in the office I’d wear indoor shoes instead but socks are so much comfier. Which leads to a lot more darning.

A nice thing about hand-knitted socks is that I can fix a hole before it actually becomes a hole. The yarn wears thin but still retains the knitted structure, and I can use duplicate stitch to reinforce it. On this sock my reinforcement even covers up an earlier, less-than-expert darning.

Store-bought socks have their benefits but they are usually made of such thin yarn that duplicate stitching them would take a magnifying glass and one of those surgery robots that repeat your hand movements in miniature.

This, of course, assumes that I notice the soon-to-be hole in time, and don’t procrastinate about fixing it until it does actually become a hole.