I’ve finally got the summary and photos from last Sunday’s event, but first a few items of news.

• Tomorrow, Repairathon volunteers will be at both the Really Really Free Market and the Toronto Repair Café. We won’t have a sewing machine, but we should have a good supply of thread. While not full-sized Repairathons, this will be our first time at two events at once, not to mention how soon it is after our last event.
• Our new volunteers Emily and Sue (see recap below) are so fantastic, they want to come back to Kensington Pedestrian Sunday again. The next one is July 28th, and I expect we will be there. Fuller details on this to come.
• If you’ve been following our blog on our website, or by getting posts by email, then you may not have noticed that the Repairathon is also on Twitter. Twitter isn’t for everyone, but I use it to post shorter messages more frequently than on the website, and sometimes highlight interesting news or other events that don’t make it onto the website.
• The Repairathon has been getting more and more interest. We’re starting to get asked to hold events at particular times and places, and we will let you know when we’ve decided on any. I have also gotten a request from someone in Edmonton on advice on starting a Clothing Repairathon there. I hope it will be the second of many cities to join us!

Okay, on to notes from our third Repairathon, at Kensington Market on Pedestrian Sunday.

Our volunteers Sunday were Emily, Sue, and Michael (myself). Look forward to more information about who are volunteers are in an upcoming post. I took the photos this time, so I’m not in any of them, but HiMY SYeD was walking by, loved the idea, and posted photos on the Toronto Wiki, and I’m in some of those.

Over the course of the day we “only” repaired about fifteen or so articles of clothing, but we were still pretty busy most of the time. Our first work came in 20 minutes before we were scheduled to start, and we were still working away on last-minute items half an hour after our scheduled end.

We handled rips and tears, missing buttons, and more. The three of us kept handing off a man’s shirt to each other, not wanting to tackle the awful state of the worn-away collar until Sue finally decided to use some ‘new’ fabric from the back of the collar as a patch on the top, even aligning the grid pattern… it may be the most impressive repair I’ve seen, and the description doesn’t do it justice. Of course, it turns out the owner only wanted us to fix a small hole in the shirt that we hadn’t even noticed. Oops :-).

I showed one man how easily it was to replace a button, and I think next time, he’ll try it himself. This really underscores how much our group needs to figure out the best way to teach repair skills. Emily also provided a lot of advice, as people asked her all sorts of questions about making a tablecloth, a tie-dyed toga, a more.

Most people who came by read about us in NOW magazine, thanks to a nice mention in their can’t-miss events. We also had quite a few people walk by and excitedly run home to bring us something to fix. We love the smiles on people’s faces when we help make their favourite clothing wearable again.

Emily and Sue, hard at work

Someone decided we could hang finished clothing until it was picked up, and a nice store-owner across the street lent us some hanger

Emily with happy “customers”

These two were glad they walked by our table that day

Sue between happy “customers.” Sue did the yoga pants, Michael fixed the sweater

Overall, it was a lot of fun, and we couldn’t have done it without Emily and Sue. Also thanks very much to Patrick of Pedestrian Sunday for arranging for us to be there and making sure we had a table and electricity. Looking forward to our next events 🙂