As a tribute to the Queen, who was loved and admired by millions of people here and around the world, here is one of the last photographs taken three days ago at Balmoral Castle.

Molly Martin has a light, gentle approach to darning and mending which goes hand in hand with her work as an illustrator. She combines delicacy and detail to both her stitching and illustrations, and uses her needle and pencil in the same way, whether she is building up a repair patch or making a drawing. She often draws what she mends; these socks reflect the affection for the pieces she works on as well as the delicate aesthetic which runs through all her work. Molly has worked as a professional textile repairer and researcher, specialising in delicate fabrics and traditional hand sewing techniques, and collaborates with TOAST. She teaches repair workshops in London and throughout the UK, and her Zoom classes for both mending and drawing are delightfully easy-going and inspirational. Her book The Art of Repair encapsulates her philosophy and easy-to-follow techniques. 

For it to be required, darning depends on damage. It is this aspect of repair which fascinates artist Celia Pym who has taken darning and mending into new realms of conceptualisation and visibility. "Her interests concern the evidence of damage, and how repair draws attention to the places where garments and cloth wear down and grow thin. In clothing, this is often to do with use and how the body moves." By making the darning visible, Pym allows the garments she mends tell the stories of their owners. The repair work on Darned Fingertips (2016) reveals the unique way in which the wearer of this pair of Japanese gardening gloves has used them. 

Celia Pym runs thoughtful, practical workshops at West Dean College and Raystitch, and can be heard talking about her work on the excellent Material Matters podcast.

Darning does not just have to be practical and utilitarian. It can be beautifully decorative,  intricate and visible, often mimicking the woven structures or knitted stitches of the item being repaired. Dutch needlewomen, in particular, produced exquisite darning samplers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of which are in the V&A. This one dates from 1820, maker unknown, although others are signed. Tom of Holland who for ten years ran The Visible Mending programme, has written about Dutch darning samplers on his website.

This week: mending, and specifically darning, the image of which has itself been repaired in recent years, and is now regarded as a positive act of re-use as well as vehicle for creative expression. Darning has moved on from associations with drudgery, ongoing battles with moth, and never-decreasing piles of socks with holes, as seen here in A Month's Darning (1876) by Enoch Wood Perry (1831-1915) which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But even in the twentieth century when mending was mostly seen as chore, darning could be layered with meaning. In Family Roundabout the formidable matriarch, Mrs Willoughby, dispenses covert charity to her prouder 'poor relations' via the mending basket. "Aunt Flo...came every Friday and took home a bag full of Willoughby socks to darn...and every week she found ten shillings in one of the toes". Meanwhile, Cousin Effie comes three times a week to do the household mending and even when there is little or no mending to do, is still given a  "good mid-day meal and a fire to sit by." In this way, Mrs Willoughby ensures that the "odds and ends" of her family remain firmly attached.

Another staple of the September garden, and a sign that autumn is approaching, are chrysanthemums. They are something of a leitmotif in The Provincial Lady novels (together with her infamous hyacinth bulbs), and Jan Struther's novel opens with Mrs Miniver carrying 'a big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street' and thinking to herself, 'it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life'. It can be a bittersweet time of year, but one enhanced by flowers like these painted by yesterday's artist, Rose Mead. This is Summer Chrysanthemums in a Blue-Flowered Jug (c.1930), also in the West Suffolk Heritage Service collection. Moyse's Hall Museum, in Mead's home-town of Bury St Edmund's, has around seventy of her paintings.

Welcome to Persephone Post Mark 2. Mark 2 because it's going to be written by me, Jane Brocket. It will still follow the format of the Persephone Post which has appeared every weekday (high days and holidays excepted) for many years.There will be a weekly theme or subject which links to, or complements, Persephone books and authors. It will, I hope, provide a small daily offering of the sort of beauty and creativity which Persephone Books has for so long celebrated. 

After writing my own, now-defunct blog, I feel like Rhoda in The New House. As she contemplates the new garden where 'nasturtiums had sown themselves all over...with a generous profusion of gold and tangerine trumpets', she feels at home there. I am delighted to be in this new home and, as early September is the high point for brilliant nasturtiums in gardens and allotments, I thought I'd begin the Persephone Post Mark 2 with Nasturtiums c.1930 by Rose Mead (1867-1946) which is in the West Suffolk Heritage Service collection.