making & mending club

Welcome to the Global Gardens making & mending club!

NEWS: we hope to get back to meeting and making in may 2023. meanwhile you can join the group chat or find out more by messaging me via my contact page. the llieinwe flax project is starting up at st fagan’s museum in april, we want volunteers for preparing the land, planting, weeding, pulling and processing – read the llieinwe page to find out more.

about mnm club: i collaborate with the Global Gardens project at flaxland allotments, to facilitate practical workshops, held within the gardens. These workshops have 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.

In 2022 we:
❖ Planted, harvested & processed flax at St Fagans Museum & continued to comb & spin the flax linen grown at GG in ‘21
❖ Botanical dye colour workshop
❖ 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

The group has grown out of my workshop sessions on making natural colours and establishing a small dye garden at the Global Gardens. We 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 workshop sessions have allowed a collective response to the site and its users, as well as us utilising local plant ingredients, kitchen waste and other recycled materials in varied ways.
I started the group 3 years ago and there’s now over 20 people on our Whatsap chat and sharing group, as well as having good in-person participation at the regular sessions held in the garden and its beautiful outdoor classroom. 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. Soon we’ll begin having others from our community leading sessions, to give a more diverse range of skills and teachers. It will also give experience of facilitating/teaching to other makers and menders, in a relaxed environment with mentoring available. We’ll be continuing and expanding the Llieinwe/Welsh linen adventure. We want more flax growers, spinners and weavers to join us, so please get in touch if you’re interested!

We’re growing a collection of suitable dye plants to make a sustainable colour resource for use by the community. This garden will be continued and extended, with the aim of making a stored physical and online resource of plants and uses for the classroom future, as well as using the renewable garden resources for fibre and wellbeing projects.

solstice christmas 2022: 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 l 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. We hope you have a go yourselves – and we wish you a happy, sustainable season!

Make a scrap paper star wreath