SOCKS Project – Teaching a Whole Primary School to Darn a Sock with Celia Pym

“It was easy because it was fun” - Diana (Year 5)

In Summer Term 2024 Celia Pym taught the whole of Surrey Square Primary School in Southwark, Central London, how to darn a sock. All the children from Nursery Class (the four-year-olds) to Year 6 (the 11-year-olds), as well as several of the teachers, staff and family members. Her book SOCKS Imaginative Mending describes the project, why it happened, how it was planned and the impact it had. It also celebrates the socks and stitches themselves with photographs of every mended sock – more than 500 in all. An encounter with craft and ‘making’ gives a child a key to opening their creative imagination. She illustrates the joyful case for why craft learning should be embedded – the author would say must be embedded – in the school curriculum. Celia will talk will tell the story of the SOCKS project and her experiences with mending and teaching mending as a tool for resilience.

Images copyright: Michele Panzeri

Celia Pym is an artist based in London who explores damage and repair in textiles – from small moth holes to larger accidents with fire. Her interest concerns the evidence of damage, and how repair draws attention to the places where garments and cloth wear down and grow thin. More recently she’s been thinking about how other people acquire and use the skills and confidence to mend and repair clothing. Her tools are scissors, yarn and a sharp needle: ‘My kit is lightweight and portable. I can travel to you. Nothing is beyond repair. And almost everything can be sorted – or invented – with needle and thread.’

Selected exhibitions/events: Things We Carry, LF Markey, London (2026); Puzzle Pieces, Gojozaka Shimizu Gallery, Kyoto, Japan (2026); Mega Mending, Moderna Museet, Malmø, Sweden (2026); Perfection: a question of repair, Penland Gallery, NC, USA (2025); and SOCKS: the art of care and repair, NOW gallery, London (solo) (2024)

Pym is an Associate Lecturer in Textiles at the Royal College of Art and teaches regularly at the Penland School of Craft and West Dean College. She has published two books ‘On Mending: Stories of Damage and Repair’ (2023) and ‘SOCKS: Imaginative Mending’ (2026).