Craft cafe and lost art of button sewing brings together young and old

“Four-year-olds today don’t know what the word ‘mend’ means and my university students have never heard of the word ‘darning’ ”, says Diane Boyd, who was so surprised she decided to get young children, young people and the over 65s together in an ‘intergenerational craft café’.

In the disposable age we live in, Britain today has become a throwaway society - a grim fact the early years academic is only too aware of.

Interested in making sustainability central to education, the early years lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University knows 20-year-olds today - collectively known as Generation Z - have as much to learn as three-year-olds, when it comes to learning craft skills.

Divorced from their own cultural heritage of crafts such as knitting and sewing, the majority of young people lack the skill set common in the baby boomer generation, who are often found home alone or in the nation’s care homes.

As the founder of a new intergenerational cafe, opened last January in Liverpool, she describes her role as mediator renewing the lost bonds between young and old. This predominantly involves early years children and those aged over 65 but young people including her students have been attracted to having a go as well as the lost Generation X (today's middle-aged). Ms Boyd, who lost her mum recently, remembers the skills and mindset of her 89-year-old mother.

“I lost my mum about 18 months ago. Mum knitted and sewed my clothes when I was younger. She could crochet. She’d make costumes when I needed it.

“She taught me to knit, sew and then I became a mother full-time and those skills got lost. That mindset seems to have gone with younger generations.

“This café is keeping her memory alive”.

Cross-stitch connections

Since January, elderly people living in council-run sheltered housing are transported by minibus to the intergenerational café in Liverpool based at Everton Nursery School and Family Centre. They are joined at the café by children from the centre’s nursery and the Dukes and Duchesses nursery.

Each month, the café showcases a different traditional skill demonstrated by those over 65, with sewing, knitting and baking among the crafts.

“It’s lovely because older people are happy they can share their knowledge and it makes them feel useful. When they first arrived they were a bit unsure but it's easier each time they come. We are hoping to get different groups of older people coming including the grandparents of nursery children.”

Dispelling myth that old people are ‘smelly or boring’

The academic also notes young children and students are getting the chance to “move away from the idea that old people are smelly, boring or grey.” One little boy called Enzo is Spanish and speaks no English. But he made friends with elderly visitor Mary when she helped him make flapjacks. Staff said of Enzo: “I have not seen him sit so quietly and still.”

The craft café’s sessions, lasting two and a half hours, have attracted the attention of not just nursery children and pensioners but mums keen to learn craft skills from older people.

“I know parents in their 30s who would rather throw a shirt away if there is a button missing, instead of fixing it. One mum told me she wanted to learn crafts like sewing just so that she could do more for her young son.

“Generations live apart. I’m also after the generation in the middle to reconnect fragmented families who may not see their elderly loved ones very often”.

There is also scope at the cafe for younger generations to teach the old something new - as older people may not be so wise when it comes to skills such as using technologies. On 16 March, students will be dropping into the café. Ms Boyd is already thinking about how her university students can use their mobiles to show older people how to take a selfie.

The café’s community sponsors include Hobbycraft which donates sewing and knitting kits. Once Ms Boyd has “collected enough data”, she is keen to convert councils to set up and roll out intergenerational craft cafés. She even has the Mayor of London in her sights to bring such cafes to the capital.

Her cafe ambitions are already crossing borders, as she is in talks with someone in Belgium to introduce her intergenerational idea to Europe’s repair cafes.

She adds: “I think everybody recognises that society is more fractured when it comes to mixing with older generations. I’m hoping this café and the creation of others across the UK can change that.”