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Broken baubles and battered belongings received a free refresh at the Palliser Pavilion on Saturday.
The Swift Current Repair Café came back around, seeing over 40 volunteers helping to fix, mend, stitch and repair everything and anything out there.
Helping keep the coffee pots topped up and the tallies totalled was Courtney Stewart, an organizer for the Repair Café. She was blown away as hundreds of people were lined up as the doors were opened, pretty much immediately.
While not everything can be fixed, all fixes can be attempted.
"We try to fix what we can, and usually we're successful," Stewart said.
This go of things brought the total of repaired items to over 1,000. That's 1,000 different devices, heirlooms, instruments, bikes, coats, teddy bears, and other things kept out of the landfill.
The whole point of the Repair Café is to help keep things going, avoiding the modern trend of facilitating disposable products by buying the new every time the old breaks. By fixing these items, they help ensure that the world is a little greener, and a little less worn down.
In fact, the Repair Café has gotten so popular and had so much luck locally with sponsorships, that they have a new mobile trailer.
"We're hoping we're able to do some pop-ups over the year (in between the big Repair Café)," said Stewart.
Growth has also brought in new tradesmen and talents for the event. This year saw the addition of a ceramics repair station and a knife sharpening booth.
The next Repair Café will be in March 2025. The exact date is still to be decided.