May the clocks be ever in your favour

4 Goodgymers helped their local community in Ealing
StephDucat
Kash
Sevan
Chris
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Ealing

Tuesday 1st April

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StephDucat
StephDucat

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Kash
Kash

SESSION ORGANISER

REPORT WRITER

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Sevan
Sevan

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Report written by Kash

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The first group run after the clocks went forward last weekend was all in bright daylight. What a difference it made! Steph Ducat, Sevan and Kash ran from Ealing Broadway to Acton to meet Mary and Lone from Ealing Repair Cafe in a new workshop location - the Hall of St Mary's Church.

Chris did not join the runners today as he was doing some proper lifting! He made his way to the task by doing the exercise called farmer's walk - or shall we say a donor's walk? Chris showed up with a ton of bags of used clothes that were ready to be reborn as something else! Well done Chris! Ealing Repair Cafe is all about reusing, repairing or recycling old fabrics.

Mary and Lone did a triage on the spot:

  • Clothes in good condition to be donated to the refugees
  • Old Liverpool and England football t-shirts to be transformed into the famous drawstring bags
  • Trainers - to be donated somewhere else (two GoodGymers declared to run back with them and send the shoes to JogOn)
  • Jeans to be upcycled into tote bags
  • Socks, shorts and particularly ripped clothes to be cut into scraps to make stuffing for draught excluders

"Those are proper jeans, we can make bags out of them! Traid usually give us those skinny jeans, and they are good mostly for draught excluders" - Mary

Ealing Repair Cafe recently donated a couple of draught excluders to St Mary's Church in Acton, which served well to secure the drafty north church door. Who knows, maybe that has also secured us a venue for today's workshop!

Chris spent the rest of the session cutting his old apparel into shreds. He did not expect that turn of events when contributing his old stuff but was extremely grateful that Ealing Repair Cafe accepted his donation. That made Chris immediately stuck into the task.

Steph, Kash and Lone were making t-shirt drawstring bags from already sewn material and by the end of the task completed all 30 that had been prepared. Ealing Repair Cafe donated their last bags batch to The Store Cupboard in West Ealing - a not-for-profit shop providing affordable food to people referred by agencies and charities. We should soon find out which charity receives our latest creations.

Sevan got stuck into detailed work of tracing the letters for Act for Ealing banner, then cut them out. That provided us with some good entertainment: making anagrams! Cleft Granola? Teal Frog Clan? Is that a good band name?

We partner with Act for Ealing as a green travel and exercise group and occasionally share our upcoming activities with them. Check out their news - you can find a lot of fantastic events with an environmental theme if you ever get bored with GoodGym. Hopefully you won't as we have an exciting event planned for this Saturday in collaboration with WWF - check it out here!


This task supported
Ealing Repair Cafe
Teaching patching and darning textiles to get the most our clothes and textiles.
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