The Merry Bobbins – crafty duo keep bygone skills alive

Crafty: The Merry Bobbins founders Chloé Burrow and Kirstie Beaven

The Merry Bobbins are an east London-based crafting duo who are passionate about bringing different generations together to craft as well as promoting crafts from days gone by.

Co-founders Chloé Burrow and Kirstie Beaven organise a series of workshops where those with a lifetime’s worth of useful skills can pass their knowledge on to younger generations.

Burrow says: “We attract a fantastic range of age groups from young trendy Broadway Market-goers to National Trust-loving baby boomers, which is exactly what we are after, a mix of generations crafting together brought together by shared values.

“Participants are slightly more discerning, we find, looking for a craft workshop with a difference, interested in resourceful rather than superfluous making.”

Recent workshops include marmalade making, pincushion sewing and a series of slipper making workshops at the National Trust property Sutton House in Hackney.

“Sutton House is such a lovely place, for all ages,” Burrow says. “It’s like a little oasis, there’s the feeling of being anywhere, or being in the countryside. There’s no wi-fi so you can’t work in there, but I believe they’re working on that.”

The Merry Bobbins put together an exciting season of vintage-inspired workshops in the run-up to the Queen’s 60th Jubilee celebrations.

The Be Your Own Butler workshop was aimed at style-conscious men where theatrical costumier Jo Poole, known as The Dress Doctor, teaches essentials such as how to properly sew on a button or iron a shirt and what to look out for with vintage clothing.

For the ladies, there was a Make Your Own Lipstick workshop with leading vintage hair and makeup stylist Amanda Moorhouse.

The Merry Bobbins are particularly interested in enabling a connection between people of different ages. Burrow elaborates: “I’ve sat on buses and had great peer-to-peer chats with old ladies fascinated by what I am knitting, not to mention having a wealth of new things to talk about with my own grandparents.

Burrow was heavily inspired by her grandparents in Devon and the ‘make do and mend’ ethos of previous generations. The workshops hark back to the idea of seeing the potential in things.

“So it’s not just an old jumper,” Burrow says, “but it’s what you can do with that jumper.” In fact, The Merry Bobbins’ signature workshop uses felted wool jumpers and off-cuts of sheepskin fleece to make slippers.

New workshops are introduced every month, with butter making and petticoat sewing coming up this summer.

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