Author Archives: admin

Learn how to Reupholster

This event isn’t being run by the Repairathon, but we thought you would want to hear about it. I’ve copied the information from their website. I also posted this on Waste Nothing, another website I run.

Old Made New: Reupholstery and You!

April 25, 2013, 4pm-6pm

CSI Annex, 720 Bathurst Street, in the ING Presentation Space

Knowing how to repair old furniture is a great way to keep things out of the landfill. In this Eco-Month workshop with Val Johnson, learn how to determine whether a piece is worth saving, how to remove old upholstery and prep pieces for reupholstering, and basic reupholstering techniques.

Bring an old chair, cushion or other covered piece with you to the workshop and get expert advice on whether it’s worth saving and how to go about giving it new life! Even if you don’t have something to bring in, the skills you’ll learn in this workshop will give you confidence when it comes to fixing a beloved piece or bargain-hunting for fixer-uppers!

For more information, contact heather@socialinnovation.ca

Skills Inventory

The Repairathon was just launched, we haven’t even had our first event or meeting yet, and already we have been attracting some attention.

The Clothing Repairathon was inspired in part by “repair cafes” which began mostly in the Netherlands and have been spreading. I believe the new Repair Café Calgary is the first and only in Canada so far. I met up a few days ago with some people from Green Neighbours 21 and beyond who are interested in doing the same in Toronto.

Before we can start planning Repairathon events for anything other than clothing, we need to find out what repair skills exist here. So… if you live in the Toronto area, have some experience repairing things, and would be willing to help share that knowledge with others, we want to hear from you. Post a comment here to let us know who you are and what you like to repair.

We’ve got repairing clothing covered (see Volunteer), and there are already great community bicycle repair places, so we’re especially interested in other things such as small appliances, small furniture, jewelry, luggage, toys, and everything else that we didn’t think of.

And of course… thanks so much for sharing your abilities.

We have a website

It’s about time the Repairathon had a website. Now we do. It’s not too pretty and still needs work, but now when you want to tell somebody about the Repairathon, you can point them to repairathon.com.

For now, at least, this blog will serve to announce events and other major announcements. Coordination for planning will continue to take place on the Facebook group.