It’s the time of year when we begin to pull out our winter clothing and there it is—that button you forgot to replace, the hem where some stitches have let go, or a simple repair that is needed before the garment can be worn again.
Help is at hand. A Mending Café will be held Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the Norfolk Hub where volunteers from the Clothes Closet will tend to small mending tasks.
The service is offered free of charge but donations to the Church of Christ will be accepted to support programs such as the Clothes Closet and Food Pantry.
Volunteer menders will take on the tasks on a first-come, first-served basis. The Clothes Closet will also be accepting gently use clothing and linens, as well as textiles to recycle.
“I’m super-excited about this,” said Jennifer Pfaltz, one of the organizers. She said the Clothes Closet now operates under the auspices of the Church of Christ’s Green Team and one of its goals is to encourage people to reduce, reuse and recycle.
“The Clothes Closet is really for everyone,” said Pfaltz. “This is a grass roots group that is starting to think about ways to educate people about textiles and clothes and how to upcycle them.”
Sweaters that have been repaired, sometimes in imaginative ways to give them a new lease on life will be for sale at the event. “It’s fun to do and nice to see something that might have ended in trash that is new again,” Pfaltz said.
“We’ve never done a mending café, so we have no idea what people will bring in,” she said. “If it’s something that can’t be done at the café, maybe people could leave [the item] and we could work on it. My hope is that we try different things like this to try to reduce the amount of waste in the textile industry.”