By Lizette Salmon, Coordinator Repair Cafe Albury-Wodonga
If Time can publicise its 100 most influential people, Cleo its 50 eligible bachelors and Forbes its rich list, we think it’s time for Repair Cafe Albury-Wodonga to publish its 10 ‘most popular’. On the eve of our fourth birthday we’re revealing everything from our most popular item and repairer to best cake. Drum roll, here we go:
- Most popular item – secateurs – sharpening of garden tools, particularly secateurs, is perennially popular.
- Most popular repair station – clothing/textiles – we roster three helpers to this station and are contemplating a fourth because it’s so busy.
- Most popular Facebook post – our post on Saturday 2nd March 2019 about the day’s repairs reached a staggering 63,000 people, thanks to a share by beloved sustainability guru, Costa Georgiadis.
- Most popular visitor postcode – 2640, closely followed by 3690.
- Most popular demonstration – our creative stain removal demos attracted the highest number of attendees.
- Most popular special feature – costume jewellery is an enduring favourite, closely followed by leather and bra repairs.
- Most popular cake – it’s a tough one, but the Portuguese tarts with their delicious baked custard fillings, donated by Kooka Brotha’s Patisserie, gets top ranking.
- Highest visitor numbers – we squeezed 82 visitors into our October 2018 session, when featuring sewing machine maintenance demos.
- Highest item numbers – a record-breaking 105 broken items were seen to at our August 2019 session – and we fixed 80% of them.
- Most popular repairer – no such thing – we get lovely comments about all our friendly, talented
If you follow our Facebook page you’ll see we’re forever innovating and dreaming up new ideas. The lawnmower session on Saturday 2 November is no exception – we’ll kick off at 10.15am with a half hour lawnmower maintenance demo, showing how to clean air filters, check spark plugs and broken leads, then from 10.45am Wolfgang and Bill will service mower blades. Please remove and clean blades before arrival, noting blades don’t usually require sharpening but might need nicks removed, straightening and balancing.
On 2nd November we’re also featuring our device help desk to trouble-shoot problems with mobile phones, tablets and laptops.
Our Repair Cafe is a community-run initiative open the first Saturday of every month (except January) and proudly supported by Halve Waste. For more information see eco.redsally.com or facebook.com/repaircafeaw.