This Sunday, Hawker Men’s Shed will hold its winter Repair Café, fixing broken items and rescuing them from landfill. This time, too, there will be a dozen ‘local made’ market stalls.

The Repair Café is the Men’s Shed’s marquee community project. Since it was set up three years ago, the café has repaired 385 items, with an 89 per cent success rate.

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The Men’s Shed will repair bikes, lawnmowers, furniture and furnishings, toys, electrical household appliances, shed tools, garden equipment, and anything mechanical, Men’s Shed president Jon Wells said. An Apple device repairer will advise on apps and hardware.

The women in the mending section (including Jill Whittaker, the Repair Café’s coordinator) will help repair fabric and woollen items.

The Repair Café will also tag and test electrical items, for $5 per item.

“We’re in a throwaway society,” Mr Wells said. “A lot of people present things that mean something to them, that belonged to their parents or a loved one. Maybe a leg or an arm broke off a chair, or a lid has come off a jewellery box that is precious to them from someone who passed [away]. We get quite a lot of these sort of things to see if we can repair them.”

In the past, the Repair Café has mended electric Christmas trees, hand-push lawnmowers, moth-eaten woollens, broken toys, vacuum cleaners, toasters, cracked pottery moneyboxes, and antique furniture.

“There’s no guarantee that we can fix them, but sometimes all it needs is a bit of support put somewhere in behind it,” Mr Wells said.

One proviso: items must be carriable – so nothing that came in on the back of a trailer.

The public can learn how to repair their items. “A lot of people will bring something in, and they want to know how to fix it,” Mr Wells said. “It can either get fixed with them watching it or them doing it.”

For instance, replacing a spark plug; sharpening knives and tools; or restoring fabric, reknitting holes and tears. Regular maintenance of mowers, too: nine times out of 10, Mr Wells said, they won’t start because of the way they were turned off after the last mow.

A local-made market will be run in conjunction with the Repair Café: small operators who, Mr Wells says, probably do not go to big events. At the last Repair Café, in March, there were only two stallholders, now there are 12.

The stalls include soft furnishings (soft toys and household items); metal garden art; watercolour art (predominantly of Canberra backyard birds); quilters (shoulder bags, quilts for beds and babies, woollen socks); homeware from bathmats to cushions, plants to plant stands; doll houses and farm scenes; slime for kids; honey and jams; and produce grown in the Hawker community garden.

The Men’s Shed will also sell bird boxes and possum boxes.

For the first time, the Repair Café will collect plastic and metal bottle tops for Lids4Kids, the environmental charity founded in Belconnen in 2019. Lids4Kids will hold a stall at the Repair Café.

As for the “café”, a canteen will serve barista coffee, cakes, muffins, slices, and a sausage sizzle. Lucky Jim will provide musical entertainment, and attendees can have hand massages while they wait.

“I’m delighted to see the Hawker Repair Cafe growing!” Jo Clay, ACT Greens member for Ginninderra and spokesperson for the circular economy, said. “Community initiatives like this are a key part of how we’ll build our circular economy. Repair, re-use and connect with others – it’s a great way to save money and the planet.”

The Hawker Community Repair Café will be held at the Hawker International Softball Centre, Walhallow Street, Hawker, from 10am to 1pm on Sunday 18 June. Entry fee: gold coin donation. Find more information on Facebook or the Men’s Shed website.