Woven darning
Take on a new technique with this cool new embroidery skill and decorate your cables and more with ease!
Discover an exciting new technique
Adding your own personal touches to your crafting is both challenging and rewarding, but it really doesn’t have to be di cult. One of the best ways to add interest to a knitting fabric is with contrasting colour. There are many ways to mix shades and colours throughout your knitting, from the more traditional methods of Fair Isle and intarsia, to one of the newer ideas – like woven darning. Darning has been around for centuries, but using darning as a woven accent is a relatively recent revelation and once you have the technique under your belt, it couldn’t be easier!
SO MANY USES
Darning originated from the need to mend and make to refresh your garments, like worn sock heels and thinning sweater elbows, but nowhere does it say that you can’t be creative when doing this. In our cable headband project (page 52) we’ve made the most of the natural divots in the cable pattern, creating a purely decorative effect with darning. But you could easily use this attractive technique to cover up an unsightly hole or reinforce an area of a favourite garment.
WOVEN DARNING ONTO FLAT FABRIC
Once you’ve mastered the woven darning technique within a confined space, like the cable divots on our headband, you can branch out to creating defined shapes. Hearts are a popular choice and can be easily added to plain, stocking-stitch fabric with ease. The vertical ladder stitches you need to put in place before weaving can be fashioned into the shape you require, for example a simple heart or circle, then you weave within these ladder stitches to create a solid silhouette. Alter the size by lengthening or shortening your ‘ladder’ stitches.
WHERE TO ADD YOUR DARNING
The world’s your oyster when it comes to considering what to add your woven darning too. We think it looks particularly good on a child’s plain jumper. Perhaps a single heart or star would look good as a badge or pocket decoration. You could add detail to the bottom of a scarf, or perhaps embellish a knitted bag. But woven darning isn’t just confined to knitted garments, this kind of decoration can easily be carried over to fabrics too.
QUICK TIPS FOR SUCCESS
1 Make sure your chosen colours make a good tonal match, or attractive contrast. 2 When working your ladder stitches in a cable divot ensure that they begin and end tucked under the cables you’re working within. 3 Your long ladder stitches need to be as straight as possible for neatness. 4 You can start weaving from the top down or bottom up. Push the weaved yarn neatly against the last row. 5 Seeing the ‘woven’ section clearly is key with this technique so spend time getting your embroidered section just right under good natural light.
WOVEN DARNING METHOD BY EMMA VINING
Top designer, Emma Vining, created this gorgeous jumper cable jumper above using the woven darning technique to add cream and yellow detail within the decorative cables. See how she did it with her written instructions below and step-by-step images over the page.
1 Begin by fastening the end of your contrast yarn to your knitted fabric and picking up one loop from the inside of the first cable divot, just under the cables on each side of the divot.
2 and 3 Make a ladder of wide stitches (from top to bottom) up through the divot, taking the needle through one strand at each side.
4 to 6 Weave the yarn back down through this ladder from end to end, picking up a ‘background’ stitch at the base of the divot to secure the stitches.
7 and 8 Continue to weave across the ‘ladder’ of stitches you hav creaed until the section is completed. Secure the yarn end on the reverse of the work.