When I started knitting seriously, I discovered that my grandmother, Irene, had owned a darning egg. My mother and her sisters grew up on a farm, and Mom vividly recalled her mother sitting in the evenings on the farmhouse, diligently darning socks using the wooden darner.

My aunt Kathy apparently was given the darning egg when my grandmother died in 1989, and used it in her country-eque decorated home. So for a year I patiently hinted and pondered and “mentioned” to my aunts how much I’d like to have Grandma’s darning egg someday. Imagine my surprise when yesterday, Feb. 22, 2010, an unknown package arrived in the mail for me. It was the darning egg from Aunt Kathy! She had decided to surprise me, instead of tormenting me with the idea of getting it one day if I was nice to her (we are all about blackmail on mom’s side of the family).

This darning “egg” is actually not egg-shaped at all. It is, in fact, a foot-form wooden darner, a design that was patented in Nov. 1907 and was commonly used in the early to mid-20th century. It has the words “FOOT-FORM” stamped across its top, and you can clearly see how much it was used by the tiny scrapes in the wood. Underneath, it used to say “PAT. NOV. 1907,” but that has all but rubbed off. If you look very closely and tilt the foot-form you can just barely see the tops of the T from the PAT and the O from the NOV. I’m glad to see that these antique foot form “eggs” are often found on eBay for rather affordable prices, so that anyone, if they like, can own a little piece of history.

Grandma married my grandfather, Pap-Pap, in 1945, and they left the farm life and moved to the “city” in 1957, when my mother, the middle child, was 9. They bought their first house for $3,000 and were thrilled to have indoor plumbing. Because I’ve listed this as a project, I decided to date it for the time period that she spent being a farmer’s wife. I’m sure that my grandmother used this darner for many more years of her life, however. I’ll treasure it always.