What can you do with that big stash of clothes you keep because you want to fix them? It's not so easy to go to night school and learn how to repair your own clothes anymore.
Stitch Kitchen co-founder Fiona Jenkin addressing workshop attendees. Photo: Stitch Kitchen
In Dunedin, a couple of women with textile businesses have set up a workshop called Stitch Kitchen.
Fiona Jenkin talked to Jesse Mulligan about how creative mending has come back into vogue.
She says the project started when she met up with an old friend and they got chatting about how they could pass on the skills they had learned growing up.
Jenkin was taught how to sew and mend clothes by her mother and later worked in the local manufacturing scene doing design and pattern work.
She and her friend both had their own businesses and were working in the same building in the historic warehouse precinct near the central city.
“There was a spare room in that building so we thought, hey let’s set up a sewing studio, and so we set up sewing machines that had been donated, our big cutting tables, and just kind of turned it into a community space where we could both teach and pass on our skills.”
Jenkin says part of their success was because of the vacuum created when night classes closed in the city. She had been a tutor for some of those classes and was saddened to see them go.
“Suddenly all that infrastructure and support to teach fell away, but, in a way, it’s quite nice to be independent and be able to structure things the way that it suits us and suits the people who are coming so we can keep our class sizes really small.”
Stitch Kitchen is open on Thursday and Fridays and Jenkin says people can just drop in and use the space.
“We’ve got a huge selection of fabrics that people can access,” she says.
They also run specific classes on things like mending, upcycling and tailoring.
The run a workshop once a month on Saturdays called Mend and Make Awesome which is targeted at people who never learned how to darn holes or sew on buttons. It’s also about teaching them that mending isn’t tacky but can add to the character of clothing.
Jenkin runs an advanced class on tailoring, fitting, and pattern making class for people who want to learn how to make their own clothes from scratch.
One of the most popular amendments people make are pockets.
“Pockets are a big deal, especially in kid’s wear and in women’s wear. We just don’t have pockets, there’s an absence of pockets in our lives and we suffer from it. So, learning to put pockets in things, or extend pockets to make them usable is a really fun thing.”
She says putting a pocket in an item of clothing is “super easy” and can be made from almost anything.
“You take a bit of fabric, and you stick it on to another bit of fabric, and you’ve got a pocket.”
Stitch Kitchen has a workshop next week as part of iD Fashion Week in Dunedin where they’ll be showing people how to upcycle beloved items of clothing. You can read more about them here.
