Repair Café set for Saturday

DEXTER — Dexter Dover Area Towns in Transition (DDATT) continues its monthly workshop series with “Repair Café,” a morning of friendly simple fix-its where people bring their expertise and tools to meet other people with busted stuff and see if we can’t fix things instead of throwing them away.

Yankee culture used to pride itself in the thrift philosophy of “use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without,” but over the past many decades our consumer economy has convinced us that “buy it cheap, throw it out, buy a new one” is a superior strategy.

Cheaply-made household items are no longer repaired when they break because the cost of repair is frequently higher than the cost of replacement, if in fact repair is possible at all.

So we are holding an experiment on Saturday April 15 at the Abbott Memorial Library, from 10 a.m. until noon, to discover what kinds of volunteer repair skills our community possesses. For this day if you have a broken item, such as shoes, bikes, toasters, axe handles, toasters, lamps and so forth (but for now no motors please as gas and oil don’t mix well with libraries), bring it. If you have skills in soldering, taping, wiring, stitching, whittling, gluing, etc. and tools with which to work, bring those. We’ll see what happens.

DDATT’s mission is to help our area reduce our use of fossil fuels and create a more stable rural economy. For more information on DDATT and future events, email info@ddatt.org to get on the news list or call 277-4221 or 924-3836.