20/03/2026
🤩Not too long now until our next Repair Café Stafford workshop – 4 April (yes, Easter Saturday 🐰!). But there is still time for some more stories, especially this little piece of pure ingenuity 💯!
Now, before we go into the story 📖, it is important to know that at Repair Café Stafford, we don’t have a store of extra pieces of wood or fabric to make repairs 🛠️. Sometimes our volunteers might have something on hand, but usually they need to think well outside the box . This is where the Little Stafford Playgroup craft cupboard can sometimes come in handy 🤫!
Now, back to the doll. She might not look her age, but this doll is over 60 years old 👀! When she was given the doll as a little girl, the owner loved the open/close eyes and spend hours dressing and caring for it 💞. But eventually the owner's taste in toys changed and the doll was put in a box. Recently she was brought out again to entertain a new generation of children, but the owner was dismayed to see that the doll's open/close eyes no longer moved, and the iris and pupil had fallen inside the head 😱. Worried about the risk the damage posed to little fingers, but unwilling to throw the toy away (partly for sentimental reasons but also because the toy was in such good condition otherwise), the owner didn’t know where to go for help 🤷♀️. And then Fate stepped in in the form of an ad on the radio about the Repair Café movement 🔮. She researched locations and came in to see us at the February workshop ✅.
That’s a lovely back story, but the real magic was about to take place. So our volunteer Damian stepped up to see what could be done 🦸♂️. Now, a lot can (and has) been said about Damian 😜😇, and he is a firm favourite with many of the regulars that come along to our workshops. Always ready with a joke and a smile 😁, but he is a very handy person to know 👨🔧. But this repair was true genius, skill and patience.
So first he painstakingly dismantled the eyes 👁️ to understand the mechanics behind it and realised that it could be salvaged as long as there was a replacement part that could be used for the iris. And then he went hunting 🕵️♂️. It turns out that a particular size and shape wooden bead from the playgroup craft cupboard was the perfect match and he only need one to do both eyes! So he cleaned up the existing parts, shaved and shaped the bead 🤺 and carefully put everything back together. It worked perfectly and without very close inspection, no one would know!
We have some very clever clogs on our volunteer team! Awesome job 🥇!
