There's a section of the museum that looks at the things that we now throw away, and how in the past these might have been repaired, altered, or reused.

We've a sewing box full of darning needles, spare buttons, leather patches, mending wool, and all sorts of other materials to allow clothes to be repaired or remodeled, rather than being wastefully thrown away.

Although Clark's mending wool was made in Paisley, not in West Lothian, miles of it must have been used locally to darn socks, repair jumpers and prevent icy winds blowing through holes in your trousers.

The idea for the advert came a picture of a cat that one of our visitors had started to draw. The unknown artist didn't finish the drawing or put their name on it, but the expression on the cat's face was so mischievous that we thought he must be up to something very bad. We imagined that the mischievous cat was unraveling a boy’s jumper and that the boy was shouting for his mother to help. Then someone suggested that if the boy was made of wool the cat might unravel him.

Lots of people drew "wool boys" and sheep for us, but James' "wool boy" picture suited best. We also chose Becky's sheep and Connor's picture of a boy in a coloured coat. We found that grannies and grandads knew all about darning holes in clothes, but that many of the children didn't know what darning was. We therefore scanned a picture from an old sewing book, coloured in the threads, and animated the picture to show how darning was done.

Then we needed an example of something that needed darning. Tim kindly put on a holey sock and allowed us to take a photo of his toe peeping though which was then animated. Sean (8) did superb job at shouting “Mam”, “Help” and “I need mending!”. Darren (6) also did very well with cat and sheep sounds. Finally we managed to record excellent voice overs from Stephen and his sister, both very clear and professional.