I remember when my mum, she was talking about, you had to know how to make your own kids clothes.
I see people now who don't know how to sew on a button and they will throw away
an item of clothing because they don't know how to use a needle and thread.
My name's Samantha Fay and I work at the New Brighton Stitch-O-Mat.
It's a community sewing facility. We offer people the opportunity to come and learn to sew,
to learn to repair, to make more sustainable choices than their fashion consumption.
Part of how I got here was probably about reducing plastics and then going about textile waste and
it just keeps sort of evolving and looking at ways we can keep reducing and reusing and remaking. The
fashion industry is the second biggest polluter in the world, so the only bigger polluter is
petrochemicals and it has multi-layers in terms of how that happens. The first is at a production
level; a natural textile comes from cotton, linen, or tree fibre. Cotton is amazingly destructive, it
uses a huge amount of water in its production but a huge amount of pesticides as well.
The second layer is chemical processes involved which can be really destructive, so you can find
videos online of rivers just running blue, that really deep blue which is dyes from fabric and
that's just going straight into the ocean. The next layer in terms of environmental destruction
of just fast fashion. People used to really look after clothes, clothes were made to last,
they're not anymore and the clothes are so cheap that people just go, 'oh we'll just you know chuck
it out and get something new.' They're cheap for a reason it's because they've been made with slave
labour. Mostly women are being paid really low wages or they're in indentured labour.
Children as well and and really unsafe working environments, really dangerous.
It has all these layers and there's so much we can do. The best thing you can do in terms of
being fashion conscious and thinking about your choices in terms of the environment, is
repairing your clothes so if you've got a piece of clothing being able to repair it and that's
something people can come here and do like we can teach you to mend your pants or fix the seam.
It's not hard, it's actually really easy once you get going, like we've got people
here who came in never having to be able to saw a straight line, they were terrified of a machine
and now they're making their own clothes and they're wearing those clothes all the time.
Maybe that's not what you want to do, that's cool, just come and have a chat and see what you can do.
I think it's about us all making little changes. This place is amazing it's really great to be able
to come and work with people and teach them things and share skills. And it's really nice to have the
involvement with the community, making friends and giving people the opportunity to learn things that
you can just drop in and learn instead of having to book or feel intimidated because you don't know
how to sew and just having everything available for them that you can just, "Ooh I'm just going
to go learn how to do something new today. I don't have to book it. I don't have to enrol. I can just
drop in and meet some really awesome, cool people and sew something." I would like the legacy that
people feel empowered, so they make connections, they learn, they leave here with more knowledge
than they came in. They just get something from it and it helps build a more resilient
community, a more resilient world. [indistinct
chatter "See you next week, thanks for coming!" "Thank you."]
Whales are massively intelligent beings and they are up against
some horrific challenges that we as humans are putting in their ways.
It's heartbreaking but then I feel privileged to have the knowledge to be able to help
if there is hope of re-floating an animal, then I have the skills to be able to do that.