In partnership with Food Futures, inspired by Little Free Libraries and in response to COVID-19, Sewing Cafe Lancaster is delivering a set of boxes strategically located to promote hyper-local community wealth building and enable people to share gardening and haberdashery items on an offline accessibility platform.
Sewing Café Lancaster thinks that Covid-19 opens up an opportunity to think about how to influence coming changes through the prism of ‘conviviality.’ The notion of Conviviality understands people as social beings who are dependent upon one another for their flourishing. This raises questions of how we really want to live together and how we society should be organized politically to enable this, and “Sew and Sow” is one of the responses to it, funded by SHED.
The Sew and Sow Free libraries project was created to address the urgent need for more sociable and solidarity economies, with the desire to strengthen care-based communities and highlight the feasibility of growing and mending in the domestic scene.
Seed bombs, loose seeds in little origami or fabric packets, face masks, reusable period pads, threads, darning mushrooms and darning yarn, along with recipes and how-to tips are some of the items we expect to be shared in the boxes to encourage food growing and mending habits.
Larger items like plants, plant food, compost, sprouting kits or pots should be offered/requested in the pockets designated for “Offer & Wants” in pieces of paper, always following the best hygiene practices during the Coronavirus outbreak.
We are initially building five pilot libraries to be set up in the Lancaster and Morecambe area, to be launched on the 9August 2020 at “Made My Day” event, in the West end in Morecambe.
If these prove successful, we would like to extend it to more localities within Lancaster and Morecambe area and beyond. But also, we would like to encourage people in other parts of the world to make their own. That’s why we are building a web page with basic information about the process, locations and how-to, and sharing experiences when it is more established. The idea is to be open access, inspire others and direct them to other platforms to learn more (eg. seed saving, how to darn, hand-mending, growing tips) depending on their interests.