making & mending club

The club is a collaborative project with me and the Global Gardens project. It allows a creative response to the gardens and its users, as well as utilising local plant ingredients, kitchen waste and other recycled materials in varied ways.

We meet at the gardens on the first Wednesday and third Saturday afternoon each month.

It also has the aim of giving pleasure and companionship to garden users and the community; exploring and developing its potential as a creative environment, a provider of beauty and wellbeing, a source of materials as well as food.

We aim to make lovely useful things and mend treasured items we already have. We are increasing our understanding of the provenance and real cost of things, whilst saving money and the use of raw materials.

The group is diverse in age, experience of textile and making processes and gender. The focus of the group moving forward is to skill share more ways and means of living sustainably, reducing our collective impact on the planet. The aim is also to provide a safe and welcoming shared space that improves mental wellbeing and reduces anxiety and isolation. we now have others from our community leading sessions, to give a more diverse range of skills and teachers, also giving experience of facilitating/teaching to newer makers and menders, in a relaxed environment with mentoring available.

In the last two years we:
❖ Planted, harvested & processed flax at St Fagans Museum & continued to comb & spin the flax linen grown at GG
❖ Botanical dye colour workshops
❖ Wild weaving
❖ Hand stitching and sashiko mending ❖ Printing with botanical inks
❖ Eco printing and hapazome
❖ Solar and Compost dyeing
❖ Paper crafts
❖ Needle felting
❖ Xmas decorations for Secret Garden Café

solstice christmas: Here’s some instructions and videos on how to make decorations as making & mending club did for the Secret Garden Cafe in bute park, cardiff.

The Cafe donated what would have been spent on their deccies to local charity The Christmas Dinner. This is a national project to provide an amazing Christmas Day for young adult care leavers aged between 18 and 25 – one they’ll never forget. Cardiff Christmas Dinner is held at Grange Pavilion. https://www.thechristmasdinner.org.uk/

We loved doing this as a winter activity to keep us connected in the darker colder months when we’re not out in the garden so much.

Make a scrap paper star wreath

Make a scrap paper star

Make a scrap cloth tree or wreath

Make a willow wand

Make a needle felted apple

https://www.heidifeathers.com/blog/read_115147/needle-felted-apple-tutorial.html

Make a scrap paper garland

This season of making n mending gatherings at global gardens will focus on Blues – growing and using Woad and Indigo as well as continuing our flax adventures, for the Llieinwe/Welsh linen project where we’ll start to make useful things with our own grown linen yarn. We want more flax growers, spinners and weavers to join us, so please get in touch if you’re interested! In the next few months we’ll be doing paper-making, weaving, willow work and botanical drawing with plant colours.

You can find out more by messaging me via my contact page.