Repairing (children’s) clothes: sewing and/or embroidery

At Het Gele Laarsje, together with residents from Leeuwarden and the surrounding area, we do our best to keep children’s clothes in circulation locally for as long as possible. A counter-narrative to the current clothing industry.

We are a residents’ initiative made up of volunteers aged between 17 and 65.

Once a month, on a Monday evening, we organise a children’s clothes swap at NHL Stenden. We open our doors at 6.30 pm and tidy up again at 8.00 pm. Parents and grandparents can drop off clothes that no longer fit their children or grandchildren and take away larger sizes or different types of clothing. Visitors can also make use of the free repair service – again, to extend the life of their clothes.

We would like to expand our team so that we can offer the repair service every month. At the moment, our repair team is so small that the service is at risk if people are unable to work for a month.

If you have your own sewing machine and can bring it along, that’s great, but if not, we’ll sort one out for you. We’ll also provide the necessary materials. If you’re not confident using a sewing machine, but can, for example, embroider lovely patches that we can attach to the clothes to cover holes or stains, we’d be absolutely delighted with that too. You could also do this embroidery at other times – the repair team can then use the embroidered patches on Monday evenings.

We also have a website www.hetgelelaarsje.nl and an Instagram account @hetgelelaarsje.

Other volunteer roles we also have:

• Building up
• Transport of clothing donations
• Taking photographs of clothing and (with permission) visitors
• Coordination
• Social media management
• Blogger
• PR
• Keeping the area tidy and helping visitors 
• Choosing what to wear (for the truly strict fashion police amongst us)
• Welcoming people and handling payments (as it can get busy, it helps to be able to cope well under pressure)
• We’d also be absolutely delighted to have someone who could whip up a healthy, tasty meal for the volunteers who start setting up as early as 5.00 pm.

We are a residents’ initiative and therefore receive little or no funding. So you should mainly do this because you want to support this cause, and/or because you’d like to work hard on it alongside an enthusiastic team.

We haven’t found a volunteer to do the cooking yet, but every now and then a volunteer offers to cook something, and then we all eat together at 5.30 pm. If you’d like, you’re welcome to join us.

There’s free coffee and tea – it’s a good idea to bring your own cup, as NHL Stenden has a ‘bring-your-own-cup’ policy!

We’d love it if you could help out at least five times a year, so that we can build a bit of a regular, friendly team.

The repair session starts at 6.30 pm, so it would be great if you could be there by 6.00 pm to set everything up just the way you’d like it. As mentioned, we can provide a sewing machine, but if you have your own that you can bring along, that would be brilliant too. At 8.00 pm we’ll tidy up – the repair team usually finishes tidying up quite quickly and then either heads home or helps out a bit with tidying the room.

You can park your bike under cover beneath the building; the bus stops right outside the door. If you’re coming by car, please bear in mind that there’s a parking charge of 3.50. We hope to be able to reimburse this in due course, but for now volunteers still have to pay it themselves.