Do you have some chairs with wobbly legs, a bookshelf that needs a sand, a coffee table that needs revitalising or garden furniture with a screw or two missing?

Don’t throw them out. Come along and fix them instead.

Our Furniture Repair workshop on Saturday 5 March from 10am-1pm is an opportunity to give your beloved but tired timber items a new lease of life.

This workshop is supported by a Sustainability Victoria grant via City of Yarra - to encourage us all to minimise our hard rubbish waste.

It costs only $15 to access our shed and equipment and Maylei’s practical expertise for 3 hours.

So if you have a project in your shed that you haven’t quite got to or are unsure how to tackle just book in here and bring it along to our shed and we’ll help you fix it!

Join Maylei in the shed for a weekend workshop on Saturday 12 March and explore the slow art of wood carving … take home your very own handmade wooden spoon at the end.

Keen? You can book in to this workshop via eventbrite here.

In partnership with Yarra Council we are hosting a visible mending workshop at the end of February to explore ways to encourage our community (us!) to reuse and recycle and keep items out of hard rubbish.

If you have jeans 👖 with a hole or a favourite shirt 👚 with a tear, or a dress 👗 or shorts 🩳 that need a stitch or two don’t throw them out … just come along and learn a range of techniques to fix them (and even embellish them at the same time) instead.

Local textile artist Serene who will be running the workshop has been making some samples over summer of stitches and techniques (you can follow her on Instagram at The Craft Report.)

To book into this workshop just click here. Visible mending costs $15 and runs from 10am-1pm on Saturday 26 February.

Local artist Rose Kulak did an fabulous job this year replacing our Science Week in-person eco-dyeing workshop with a take home kit. Over 20 families collected the kits from us. I know I’ll never look at sour grass (oxalis) now without thinking about the amazing colours it can produce in a dye bath.

As a follow-up Rose has now put together a second kit that is an introduction to contact printing with natural dyes … onion skins, eucalyptus leaves etc. The kit includes all the materials you will need along with a step by step instruction sheet … it will make a wonderful weekend or mid-week project.

If you emailed us previously for one of these kits please pop in and collect it this week. If you haven’t put your name down but would like to collect a kit and have a go please email us here.

And thanks again Rose for sharing your skills. What a great community we live in!

We are taking Monday and Tuesday off, but are looking forward to getting some more programming up and running in the next few weeks. Here’s what’s on the cards from our discussions this week:

• Japanese playgroup is returning onsite … it will be lovely to see Maimi and the families and especially to see how much the children have grown!

• Matthew is resuming guitar lessons onsite on Monday and Wednesday evenings.

• We are welcoming a new counsellor to ACC. Martina who has recently moved to the neighbourhood will be here one afternoon/evening a week.

• Our Wednesday daytime book club is going to meet in person in November.

• And finally we are looking to resume our Women in the Shed program in a couple of weeks - hooray! Maylei will be taking both classes and Kalimna has been in contact with everyone that was booked in in Term 4 (and 3 I think) to see who would like to get cracking before the end of the year.

It is pretty nice to start doing things in person again, and we are looking forward to a slow and steady resumption of activity.

If you are part of a group that has a plan and haven’t chatted to us yet just give us a call or send an email …

Some of the great kids who come along weekly to Japanese playgroups …