Introduction: Sockophones - Earphone Padding Made From Socks

About: Graduate student at the MIT Media Lab.

As my headphones were a little uncomfortable without padding, I decided to make some. I am a lazy person and sewing takes me very long, so I used old socks to keep it simple.

Step 1: Cutting the Socks

First I cut the socks in half. Only the upper tube part is required, the bottom part can serve as padding. Where you cut the socks depends on it's length, thickness and how you want to pad your earphones (as explained on the next page).

Step 2: Cutting the Padding

I cut out padding from some soft, foamy material I had laying around. If you want to avoid having to make extra padding, you can also experiment with rolling up the socks. (My socks were too thin for that.)

The padding is the size of the earphones, with a hole in the middle determined by guesswork. You can utilize the unused bottom part of your cut sock for padding. However, as softness and thickness are up to personal preferences your socks might result in uncomfortable padding.

Step 3: Attaching the Sock to the Earphones

For my earphones, I only had to wrap the sock tube over the edge of the earpiece as shown in the photo below to attach them. They are inside out, the reason will be shown in the next slides.

Step 4: Putting the Padding on the Sock

Slide the padding onto the sock. That is where it comes in handy to have a hole in the padding. The hole is not bad when using the headphones later on either.

Step 5: Wrap the Sock Onto the Earphones

Now, wrap the sock back onto the earphone. (That's why it was inside out before.) It should then look like in the second image. The nice seam of the sock gives it that extra professional touch your friends will envy and adore you for.

Step 6: Fin

Hope you enjoy your new headphone padding. I'm a little sad I only possess dark socks, a color version would be nice.