On a Wednesday evening, a group of women is gathered at Mimi’s Needlepoint in Dallas, their hands moving thread through canvas, their conversations easy and unhurried. Someone’s working on a Christmas ornament. Someone else is stitching a bag charm. A few of them have become so close that they coordinate which weekly Sip & Stitch sessions to attend together and make plans to hang out outside of the store.
Madeline Alford, 35, co-owner of Mimi’s Needlepoint, is amazed by it all. A few years ago, she left her career in New York City and moved back to Dallas after spending more than 10 years in what she describes as “the corporate grind of working 8 to 6, coming home, doomscrolling, watching the news and going to bed, and then doing it all over again,” before she and her cousin Amelia Alford, 30, decided to do something different. They started an online canvas design company that has grown into a brick-and-mortar store—and now a community. “It’s a third place,” Alford says, “somewhere people can come and hang out, make friends and learn this very analog craft.” (The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term third place in 1989 to describe somewhere that isn’t home or work.)
According to Alford, the biggest challenge since opening their doors has been the supply chain, which tells you something about this growing movement. Needlepoint has exploded so fast, she explains, that there’s a shortage of the canvas itself. Thread is hard to come by too. “You’ll go to needlepoint stores, and none of us are fully stocked,” she says.
Something is happening across America, and not just with needlepoint.
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The rise of old-school hobbies
Over the past few years, younger generations have taken up so-called “old-school” hobbies with gusto. Gen Zers are joining knitting and mahjong clubs in numbers that are surprising even to the people who run these groups. And Millennials are buying landlines for their kids to delay giving them smartphones. Independent bookstores and specialty magazine stores are popping up in cities across the country. Pen pals are coming back into fashion. Bird-watching has taken flight. Bread baking is on the rise. The common thread here is tactile activities, which more people are seeking out as they shy away from screen time.
Those who study leisure and well-being aren’t surprised. Research published in the journal Nature Medicine in 2023 found that people who reported having at least one hobby showed fewer symptoms of depression and higher levels of happiness, health and life satisfaction. A separate study published in the Journal of Global Health in 2025 found that adults who engaged in regular hobbies had a 29% lower risk of mortality. But the benefits, researchers note, aren’t limited to a single age group or hobby.
Robert Waldinger, MD, is a psychiatrist and the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is one of the longest-running studies of human happiness ever conducted. Dr. Waldinger has spent decades trying to understand what makes people thrive, and his research keeps pointing to the same answer: other people.
“When we asked people in their 80s what they were proudest of,” he says, “it was always about people. It was always, ‘I was a good spouse. I was a good parent. I was a good mentor.’ It was never about winning a prize or making money.” But personal connection feels more elusive than ever. Part of the problem, says Dr. Waldinger, is what the digital world does to our perception of reality.
“Never before,” he explains, “have we been as confused and uncertain about what’s real. Is this person online real, or is it a bot? What am I seeing in the news? What am I not seeing?” That constant uncertainty, he explains, is corrosive to our well-being. But in person, the doubt dissolves. “I see with my eyes,” he says. “It’s tangible. I believe it. I see who this person is.”
Connections in real life
Lindsay Degen, 38, first tried knitting as a child. Her grandmother taught her how to cast on and cast off, but they didn’t live close to each other, so the lessons happened sporadically, during visits. Over the years, Degen developed an interest in fashion and went on to study textiles at Rhode Island School of Design, then launched a knitting club over Zoom during COVID-19 because she felt isolated at home.
That group was small at first, but it quickly grew into an online community that she named Knit Club. In 2024, she opened a brick-and-mortar store with the same name in Providence, Rhode Island. Its calendar is packed with knitting circles, beginner boot camps and a roster of events that pair knitting with just about anything: Lord of the Rings marathons. Drag nights. Purl and Swirl gatherings with wine from the shop down the street.
The store hosts free Craft Circles twice a week. “The one on Tuesday is rowdy,” Degen says, smiling, “while the one on Sunday is chill and sweet.” Both draw college students, 70-somethings and everyone in between. The motto is “All Crafters Welcome!” You don’t even have to knit: “You can show up and draw,” says Degen. “You can do anything you want, as long as it’s not wet.”
Degen admits knitting blurs the line between her work and her leisure, but that’s part of the attraction: “I’ve made my job out of my hobby, so I go home from work and I knit … but then am I actually still at my job?”
She suspects a lot of people share that restlessness. What knitting offers, she says, is visible, measurable progress as you see something building, row by row. “A lot of people say knitting is Zen,” she says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true when you’re a beginner. It can be really challenging. But overcoming the challenge and seeing your thing build is super rewarding.”
One of the things Degen values most about knitting is that it keeps her present. “I’ll be talking to someone, and I’ll just start scrolling,” she says, “and then I’ll think, Wait, what am I doing? I’m talking to you.”
Having something to do with her hands, she’s found, solves that. You can carry on a full conversation while stitching. You don’t need to make eye contact if you’d rather not. There’s a shared experience, and that often turns out to be enough to start a friendship. “You have an immediate thing to talk about,” she says. “But the very sweet thing about it is where the relationship ends up.” One of the people who joined Degen’s original Zoom circle in 2020 was a woman named Vanessa Krebs, calling in from Waco, Texas. The two hit it off. Eventually, Krebs moved to Providence and is now the manager of Knit Club. “Doing something like knitting together is a great way to make adult friends,” Degen says. “Because making adult friends is hard.”
The power of proximity
Tina Roth Eisenberg, 52, had that same thought about 20 years ago. A Swiss-born graphic designer, she had moved to New York City in 1999. Wanting to meet other creative people, she figured the best way to find them was to bring people together herself. So in 2008 she started a free monthly breakfast lecture series, which has grown into the world’s largest face-to-face creative community. Called CreativeMornings, it’s a global network with chapters in more than 252 cities across 70 countries. (Find a map at creativemornings.com.)
Part of what fuels CreativeMornings’ success is a collective appetite for in-person gatherings, and Eisenberg has a theory as to why that appetite is intensifying. The rise of AI, she says, has put our discernment on constant high alert, and digital spaces have started to feel stressful. “It’s exhausting, this constant Can I trust this? Is this real?” she says. “The only thing that you can trust at this point is being present in front of someone.” Beyond trust, something special happens in person that can’t quite be replicated online. “I really believe in the energy of sharing a loving space,” Eisenberg says. “That’s where our hearts connect.”
Recognizing the growing desire for in-person events, CreativeMornings launched a volunteer-led series in 2024 called Clubs, organized around single activities and designed to be even more local and more recurring than the monthly breakfasts. No matter the focus of each club (it could be sending snail mail, junk journaling or swapping skills), the through line is consistent: People want more intentional, more tactile ways to spend time together. Video editor and freelance photographer Nelson Luna, 37, was one of the first to sign up to run a CreativeMornings club.
A self-proclaimed introvert, he has come to understand the impact the in-person creative community has had over his past three years as the volunteer photographer for New York City’s CreativeMornings chapter. So he started PhotograPals, a casual “photowalk” club that meets every other Saturday to walk around different local neighborhoods and take photographs with cameras or phones.
The rules are minimal by design. The group meets at a locally owned coffee shop. People do a round of introductions. Then they walk. They take photos—or they don’t. Mostly they talk. Luna deliberately doesn’t mention at the club that he shoots professionally. When people discover this and ask him for advice, he’s happy to give them pointers after the club ends. But during the walks, the cameras are beside the point, he says, since “the important part is spending time face to face in good company.”
And that concept works. Club members have shown up to one another’s birthday parties. And when one regular was featured in a photography exhibition at her church, a group of her PhotograPals came to support her. Luna, who signed up to host because he wanted to build community, has found that the community has built him a little bit too. “Ever since I started my club,” he says, “I’ve been getting dragged into being more of an extrovert.”
A technological springboard
Ask anyone engaging in these analog activities why they’re suddenly so in demand, and you’ll hear the same things: The pandemic drove people to use their hands—to bake sourdough, to play a musical instrument, to try knitting—and the habits stuck. But the community aspect, which was impossible during isolation, turned out to be the thing people craved even more. Once the world reopened, they went looking for it.
Then there’s something harder to name, but everyone seems to feel it. “What we do to build community, to create our own joy and share it with other people,” Luna says, “that’s its own form of resistance when it comes to the narrative of divisiveness.” Degen echoes this. She says she wants people to think of Knit Club as “this place that sometimes you come for free and sometimes you’re paying for a class, but either way, you’re welcome here and you’re supporting your local community.”
As for an overabundance of screens driving people to take up these hobbies, technology still has a role to play here. Social media is how needlepoint found its new audience in the first place. Mimi’s Needlepoint went from having a few hundred followers on Instagram to 17,000 in just over a year; the account is how many in Dallas discovered the store. Degen uses online tools to make knitting more accessible—for example, by posting YouTube tutorials. And CreativeMornings relies on its digital platform for club sign-ups.
So it’s not that people are rejecting technology outright. But they are pushing against the idea of being always online, always scrolling, always reacting to something an algorithm put in front of them. The hobby—the club, the walk, the sip-and-stitch event—is more rewarding and meaningful to people because they’re choosing it for themselves.
Back in Dallas, the women who have gathered at Mimi’s Needlepoint are already planning their next get-together. And Madeline Alford is ready to join them. She started doing needlepoint for the simplest of reasons: to make a handmade Christmas ornament each year for her goddaughter. One stitch at a time, it grew into something bigger than she ever expected.
“We’re really proud that we’ve made a space where people are finding friendship,” she says. “It’s amazing to see the community and the pride of making something with your own hands. You can’t replicate that.”
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