Ealing Repair Cafe encourages people to take positive steps to help the environment by recycling old clothes rather than discarding them. The founder of the organisation, Mary, runs sessions to teach people techniques like sewing, patching and darning to give fabrics a second life. Tonight, Mary hosted a special workshop for GoodGymers - a thank you for our support in promoting the Reduce and Recycle Hub where Ealing Repair Cafe have its stall.

The objective tonight was to make bunting out of salvaged denim and other pieces of material that Ealing Repair Cafe could later donate to various community groups to use at festivals. The secondary task was a real treat: create a GoodGym flag out of scraps!

Excited about making the GoodGym banner, team Hammersmith & Fulham: Analiese and Divya, together with Kash made a start at cutting out the templates for the sign.

Christos, Mike, Milly and Sevan opted for the bunting task and set off to attach the triangle pieces of material onto a tape with pins. Mary gave Sevan and Christos a refresher on operating a sewing machine - something they did last time in school! Milly, an upcycling enthusiast herself, didn't need additional special instructions on how to sew and also had a go on the machine. The device kept playing up. Just imagine Milly's expression when she discovered the bobbin had come off while she was sewing the bunting together. Despite the technical obstacles, several strings of bunting have been created!

In the meantime, Team Flag cut out the letters from red fabric and played with composing them into words. Mdog, dog gym, mood? Eventually, the GoodGym logo emerged - but improved! - with the ABBA-style sparkly symbols at the top! The team then pinned the logo onto the purple background material chosen by Mike. That's when we run out of time for tonight.

If you fancy helping Mary from the Ealing Repair Cafe get more people interested in repairing or recycling their clothes, come down to Acton this Thursday and spread the word about the Reduce and Recycle Hub.

Next week, we are changing our trade again - from tailors to boxers! Don't miss the group run where we will be Knocking out the mess at Hanwell School of Boxing charity!

HANGOT's first work evening of the year brought Ealing GoodGymers out on Monday, which was unusual, with a quick run along a sunny canal to reach the task. They took a short walk with the HANGOT volunteers to the closest orchard to their base, the Piggeries, so named because pigs used to be reared there.

There were lots of general maintenance tasks to get on with. Kash and Christos started by chopping the weeds growing around the trunks of the fruit trees, preparing them to be mulched in the coming weeks. Sevan meanwhile, as the tallest of the group, chose to lop the tall branches of the back hedge to let the sunlight in, with Kash and Christos soon joining him in trimming the face of the hedge.

Everywhere Kash went, birdsong followed. Unlike the flower planting task in Walpole Park at the weekend, it wasn't a robin following her around. She had squeaky shears, which did a surprisingly good impression of a song bird 🐦

The final jobs of the session involved brambles, which weren't as troublesome as you might think. The brambles running through the back hedge were to be left as they apparently produce very sweet blackberries in the summer. Everyone looked forward to sampling those. The darker side of brambles lay on the ground. The trio were asked to trim any cute baby brambles that they could find. They knew why... like Gremlins, they had to stop the cute leaves from turning into out of control monsters come the summer.

The GoodGymers left the orchard and walked back along the canal as sunset neared, happy with a job well done. Our next session helping HANGOT will be at their Orchard Love day on the 11th of May.