You'll need to choose the color and weight of your darning thread according to the effect you want.
Darning mostly requires cutting thread and trimming rough edges on the torn fabric, so you don't need special sewing scissors.
Optional tools are a thimble and a darning egg or mushroom.
Darning eggs and mushrooms are slightly different shapes, but they serve the same purpose.
Darning eggs look like, well, eggs, and are most often made of wood, though ceramic, stone, and even silver darning eggs also exist.
Many other rounded, smooth-surfaced objects would work as substitute darning eggs.
If you're mending socks, remember to stretch them over a darning egg so your darn ends up the right size for the foot that goes into the sock.
Tighter darning will be a little stiff to begin with, but will wear better than loose work.
The blanket stitch darn is really only appropriate for darning socks, as it tends to make a small "bubble" of thread--perfect for sock heels and toes, but clumsy on flat surfaces.
It would have been easy to have made Darning an unsympathetic yuppie-come-home, symbolizing China's race for modernity and indifference toward preserving the past.
In fact, the film is more about broader values like forgiveness and coming together -- also the central theme of another new Chinese pic, Zhang Yuan's "Seventeen Years" -- not only between father and son, but also the other characters: the feuding Zhang (Hu Beibei) and his sharp-tongued wife, two proud old friends (Li Ding, Feng Shun) who fall out after a petty argument over their crickets, and an indebted businessman who initially takes Darning as an easy touch.