On this Easter Saturday, we joined the Friends of Lancaster Library (FoLL) to do a workshop with pyrography! Lots of people, young and old, managed to draw a Easter/spring based design onto a wooden spoon.
Even after we ran out of wooden spoons, we still had some wooden coasters for art!
The pyrography pens were kindly provided by FoLL.
We had our first hand-made Secret Santa at the end of last year. A wide variety of techniques and materials were used to make intriguing gifts! I think everyone got something very unexpected, but hopefully also something to be loved for a long time to come.
Thanks for the inspiration from the Good Things Collective, who have been running a similar event for a few years now. Let’s hope that this can become a regular event for us going forward!
For a few years, we’ve been helping to repair things that members and the public bring to us. Ideally, we’ve tried to teach the owner how to repair the article, letting them do all the work, but we’ve done the repairs with their help where it was too complex or dangerous to give them the necessary knowledge. We don’t have a dedicated repair event, but you can come to any of our free open meetings, 6:30-8:30 every Wednesday evening, with your broken items. You can alternatively learn to make or upcycle materials at the same meeting!
One of our volunteer experts working inside a computer
Repairs are nominally free, but we will accept donations to help us keep the place running.
There may be direct costs for materials, such as for 3D printing filament, or for spare parts, such as a new SSD for your laptop. If we don’t have something immediately available, we will give you a link to buy it yourself and you can bring it in to a future session.
These are just some of the items that we’ve helped members of the community to repair, largely by themselves:
We can only handle so much repair volume ourselves (we are available weekly, but we only have one or two repair experts available at each meeting). On the other hand, we do operate in a dedicated workshop and have a wide range of heavy equipment, tools and storage parts, which couldn’t be easily brought to a general repair event!
There are several other local options for you, which might suit your repairing needs better than we do:
Or members have attended the repair cafe run at Brookhouse Community Church Hall, as repair experts.
The Sewing Cafe have been specialising in textile repair for years!
Please note that larger, dedicated repair events have started recently, which are not related to us: Lancaster and Morecambe Repair Cafe .
For large pieces of furniture, we recommend contacting the Lancaster Men’s Hub. We can probably deal with smaller items like chairs and side tables, but not larger jobs like dining tables.
Separate to our Repair Shop, we also refurbish laptops and give them to other local community organisations, charities and refugee groups. Do you have an old machine taking up space in a cupboard? We gave well over 100 usable laptops to schools during COVID lockdown!
We had a class of kids in to try making carving in wood. They all did at least as well as the adult class we had earlier in the year!
All yellow cedar, above, but see how much difference a coat of linseed oil makes!
Working hard in the workshop:
We had a few activities on at the library, this afternoon. Several people learned how to use a heddle loom:
Most popular, however, was our new badge making machine:
and those that wanted colourful dolls’ furniture weren’t left out:
We had a couple of sessions at Lancaster library last week, helping young children to design the dimensional objects that we fabricated for them while they waited. Mostly, their drawn designs or ideas were used to create a model using the excellent & free Tinkercad website (tinkercad.com). We even had a retired person give it a go on the day!
We will be back there doing a few more activities in the next few weeks too.
Yesterday, 27th July, 2024, we were part of a mini Fun Palace event, stationed at the Judges’ Lodgings in Lancaster town centre.
We brought parts for Sue’s laser-cut, doll’s size wooden dining chairs and park benches – the public was encouraged to decorate them, glue them together and take them home. We do creative, interactive events like this through the year and always need extra bodies to help out, if you are interested.
Today, we passed on a nice refurbished laptop to Grant, from the Employment Support Team. He took it to give to a vulnerable person, who is trying to get back to work – we wish them the best of luck!
If you have an old computer that you don’t need any more, why not drop it off with us and we can try to give it a good home!
Our last two wood events of the summer are near the beginning of July and on the bank holiday at the end of August. Both of these events are facilitated by Woodies Woodland Craft Training & Education.
Spoon carving – Monday 8th July, 6-8:30pm (£5-20)
Whittling day – Monday, 26th August, 10am-3pm (£10-40)
Kids, from 10, can attend, assuming they are accompanied by an adult.
Yesterday, we were at Tabletop Republic Lancaster, running an event as part of a city-centre wide Lancaster Fun Palace. We try to get involved in local STEAM outreach as often as possible!
Visitor were able to design their own playing cards, using blank cards that we’d cut out with laser beams. They ended up making some very innovative and vibrant designs!
We also had the first playtest of a eco-themed card game that Bil is designing. This will become part of a secret project later in the year! The mechanics were a little off, because we got completely bogged down in pollution really early in the game. Thankfully, real life isn’t quite that punishing. The volunteers gave very useful constructive criticism – thanks!
