The ReCreators

Don't Toss It, Mend It! ♻️

Give your favourite clothes a new lease on life at our Visible Mending workshop!

Join The ReCreators at New Lynn War Memorial Library on Thursday 23 July, 10am to 1pm, and learn simple techniques to repair your clothes with colourful, creative stitching that celebrates the mend.

It's a fun way to learn a new skill, save money, and keep textiles out of landfill.

https://events.humanitix.com/visible-mending-new-lynn-war-memorial-library-thursday-23-july-10am-to-1pm

When science, physics, engineering and maths meet creativity and design, that's where the real learning happens.

In our free design tamariki woodworking, Ger had a great conversation recently with one of the managers of our school holiday programme. We got talking about how everything in our lives now comes in a neat, tidy packet. Flat-pack, pre-cut, pre-measured. It's efficient, sure, but it quietly takes away the need to actually think through logistics such as weight, balance, structure, why something holds and something else doesn't. Our wood comes with definite shapes and sizes but others are completely variable. The whole point being to design with what exists (not what you can buy neatly) and learn to adjust a design way of thinking.

Tamariki will often want to join long pieces together up high, and no matter how much we want to say yes to every idea, physics has its own opinions. It's a gentle, honest lesson: not every design will stand, and that's okay, that's the engineering process.

This is one of The ReCreators all-time favourite courses because of that freedom. The designs that come out of it are incredible, catamarans, dinosaurs, cars with milk bottle wheels, whole houses with sitting rooms. All built from reclaimed native and non-native timber (thanks Innature - Natural Latex Mattresses, Solid Timber Beds. NZ Made.) offcuts and Resene paint.

Even the "extras" are reused: old curtains become tablecloths, scrap t-shirts become rags, offcut sponges become paintbrushes, old containers become water pots. Barely anything is bought new.

It's amazing what happens when kids design from scratch instead of from a packet, all the thinking, the failure, the problem-solving, the joy.

&culture