Online sewing club

Who are you?

Seema Rajani, partnership member of Wormley and Turnford Big Local in Hertfordshire.

What did you do?

Moved our weekly sewing club online during lockdown. 

Why?

To continue having a weekly catch-up with members of the club and a chance for people to share what they’ve been making.

What’s the benefit?

It gives people some structure in their week and continues to build on the relationships we have cultivated in the sewing club.

Since August I have been running a weekly sewing club for local residents in the community hub. We used some of our funding to buy two sewing machines and had a further two donated by a local charity.

I have worked in clothes manufacturing for over ten years and wanted to set up a group where local residents could get together and share tips and ideas about sewing and making garments.

We have between ten and fifteen regular members and they each pay £2 a week to attend and this has meant that we’ve been able to buy equipment and pay for external guests to come in and give workshops – we had a fantastic jewellery one that went down very well.

When lockdown was announced, we didn’t want to lose the momentum we had built up so we decided to move our sewing club online. Although sewing is our main area of interest, the online sessions have quickly become a regular catch-up where we all check in on each other to see how we’re coping with these unusual circumstances.

Some members of the group already had their own sewing machines but we’ve been able to lend two of our machines to local residents who wanted to practice their skills in lockdown. Its nice to know that they’re being used!

Some people have been showing us their sewing projects over Zoom and we all enjoy sharing inspiration for new projects. The group has never been a sewing lesson – its more a place where we can bounce ideas of each other and teach each other new skills, whether thats crochet, knitting or sewing so it has been great to be able to continue this during lockdown.

We recently changed the time of the group from a Wednesday to a Thursday so that we can all watch The Great British Sewing Bee on Wednesday and share our thoughts the next day. This has come at a perfect time for us as its really fun discussing the show and the garments, designs and techniques that we found inspiring.

We’re planning sessions for when lockdown is over and basing them on some of the projects from the Sewing Bee that people would like to have a go at.

One of the projects that has arisen during lockdown is making scrubs for local NHS staff. We had to order the material specially and make sure the garments we were making met the specifications required. We have been doing this at the community hub while observing social distancing guidelines.

It has been a really good learning opportunity for some of our newer members as making the same garment multiple times is great sewing practice.

It has been rewarding to see the local community respond to the demand for PPE and get involved in the fight against COVID-19.

At the moment we don’t know when lockdown is going to end and social distancing measured will be eased but we’re lucky that we’ve managed to continue our group during this period.

Sewing is a fantastic thing to do in lockdown so it would be great to see the emergence of a new generation of sewers as a result of this crisis.