We will be hosting our AGM on Monday 23rd of October at 6:30pm here at Alphington Community Centre.

This year we’ll be combining our AGM with a dinner. We hope our volunteers and regular attendees can come along to help us celebrate the year - and get to know each other more!

Please let us know if you would like to attend for catering purposes. You can RSVP here.

The Alphington Toy Library has been reinvented online. You can now scroll though all the toys, book them at a time that suits you, then pop past to collect them on Tuesdays.

Find out more and join up here.

This week Sarah (our volunteer who comes along to fill the orders) has put together some borrowing ideas for the theme

‘Do you want to come to my party?

Toys in our library that fit in with this theme include:

• costumes - pirate, fairy, ballerina etc.

• outdoor games - stilts, tunnels, parachute for group activities etc.

• wooden birthday cake

• party set (great for sustainable parties)

• tea set

• board games

If you’d like to visibly support a yes vote in the upcoming referendum we have 50 coreflute boards at ACC for anyone to collect and display.

Just pop past when our office is open, 9am-5pm Tuesday and Thursday or 9.30am-3pm Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Women in the Shed continues in Term 4.

Be quick to book a place in either the Introduction or the Intermediate course.

The 6 week program begins on Thursday 19th of October. We hope to see you here.

Our clothing repair workshop is coming up in Term 4, on Saturday 28 October. It starts at 10am and costs $10.

If you’d like to repair your clothes but you don’t know how to sew, this workshop is for you!

Join professional mender Mary-Ellen Jordan to learn simple sewing skills that just use a needle and thread, before progressing to some more advanced skills such as decorative stitching and patching for funky visible repairs. This workshop will cover:

• Types of needles and thread and their uses

• Basic hand sewing stitches

• How to hand stitch up a seam that’s come undone

• How to hand stitch up a hem that’s come undone

• How to sew on a button

• How to make a patch and stitch it onto your garment

• Some fancier stitches to boost your visible mending game

• Ideas and tricks for visible mending

Bring along a garment that you’d like to repair, or just come along and use the available materials to learn the techniques for future use.

Mary-Ellen Jordan is a professional mender who almost always uses simple hand stitching techniques in her work. She specialises in visible mending, putting a contemporary twist on traditional mending techniques by using them to fix a problem and add a touch of colour, pattern or texture to the garment. You can see some examples on Mary-Ellen’s facebook and instagram accounts @thetinyinstitute.

Book your place here.