When you imagine Joanna Lumley, what is it you picture her doing? Swigging Bolly from the bottle as Patsy? High kicking in heels as Purdey in The New Avengers? How about darning an old pair of socks? No? Well, you might have to reconsider.
Darning is, actually, a thread that runs through Joanna’s life (if you’ll excuse the pun). She’s spoken of it often over the decades, telling The Independent that she’s ‘very good at it’ and The Telegraph that ‘darning holes when the moths have got at our jerseys’ is one of the things that prevents her ever getting bored.
And suddenly, she’s not alone. Pinterest has just published its 2026 Hobbies Trend Report. It’s broad finding is that people are increasingly choosing hands-on, screen-free hobbies that command attention and produce something tangible, with tactile crafts and analogue activities growing as a backlash against doom-scrolling. Searches for ‘repair aesthetic’ rose 167%, they say while those for ‘sashiko ideas’ rose 1,509% (more on that in a second).
The appeal of darning
‘I darn and sew on buttons and turn up hems, if a seam splits I sew it carefully myself. I take great pride in doing that because I come from a generation where we always did that,’ Joanna told Marie Claire. ‘We had no money and we couldn’t afford to buy clothes so you had to make do and mend, but there was so much pleasure in doing that!’
Two in three people in the UK say they have spent around £277 a year replacing items they think could have been repaired, according to research published earlier this year by ReLondon. There’s a clear appeal in learning making-do and mending at a time when funds are tight, and a strong environmental argument for doing so too.
The research also revealed that 335 million items which could have been repaired are being thrown away every year, with textiles and electricals topping the chart for most commonly binned items. To put that in context, it’s six things per person in the UK.
Mending clothes and other textiles, it found, is now one of the most popular forms of repair, with 47% of keen to give it a go. In fact, it’s turning into something of an art form.
Transformation not perfection
Visible mending methods like sashiko, embroidery, colourful patches or decorative stitches mean you can actually make an old jumper more interesting by repairing it. The Crafts Council notes that mending workshops are attracting people precisely because they’re about transformation rather than perfection.
And yet again, Joanna got there first: ‘When moths have eaten jerseys, either I darn them in a completely different colour or I put a button or a patch over them,’ she said, back in 2021. That really is absolutely fabulous, darling.