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Across Falls Church, residents, businesses and community groups are turning mending, lending and creative reuse into a more sustainable way of life.
The effort takes many forms, from toy borrowing and leather repair to textile circles, fiber arts groups and clinics where children help restore treasured stuffed animals. Together, these activities support the city’s long-term environmental vision for 2040 while creating places where neighbors can exchange skills, tools and companionship.
Falls Church formally recognized that commitment last October when it issued its first declaration supporting International Repair Day.
The Mending Circle embodies the movement at a weekly, informal gathering where participants repair clothing and other textiles they are not ready to discard. Although the group is self-guided rather than instructional, members freely share knowledge, supplies and tools. The screen-free setting also gives people a quiet place to talk and listen to one another.
The Falls Church Fiber Artists follow a similar model. The weekly knitting and crochet group began three years ago with four participants. It now has hundreds of people on its mailing list, typically draws about 25 attendees and has reached 30 on some occasions. A newcomer joins nearly every week.
Members turn yarn into squares, quilts, blankets, small creatures, buttons and earrings, with some finished pieces donated to charity. Even leftover yarn is put to use.
Temporary events have created more ways for residents to participate. Falls Church Forward organized a buy-nothing-style Community Share Fair last May, while Cassie Herman, a recreation specialist with the city’s Recreation and Parks division, developed the first Scrap to Stamp event.
Scrap to Stamp is intended to draw attention to the environmental effects of fast fashion, including its reliance on nonrenewable resources, intensive energy use and contribution to pollution. Many garments also contain microplastic fibers that can take hundreds of years to break down.
Participants bring old clothes or fabric scraps and cut out patches featuring favorite colors, prints or patterns. The pieces are attached to white fabric backings to make decorative stamps that can be exchanged, used as patches or displayed as miniature fabric artworks.
The activity offers a creative alternative to discarding old clothing while encouraging residents to consider the full lifecycle of what they wear.
Local businesses also sustain the city’s repair-and-reuse network. TINT — A Modern Makerspace supports textile and fiber arts including knitting, quilting, sewing, spinning and weaving.
Entangled similarly provides a gathering place centered on yarn and human connection. Owner Kelly Schnapp said the shop’s name reflects the idea that people’s actions affect one another and that communities should work together. Customers come not only to stitch, but also to meet people.
Bedo’s Leatherworks has carried the repair tradition through two generations. Bedros Doudaklian founded the business in 1977 and later taught his youngest son, Steve, the trade. After the elder Doudaklian died in 1991, Steve continued the legacy and expanded the company beyond shoe repair.
The business now handles leather and suede garments, luggage, custom leather goods and even shoes damaged by dogs. Bedo’s serves customers in Falls Church and around the world, with people shipping valued belongings to the shop for restoration. The company is due to celebrate its 50th anniversary next year and has earned numerous honors, including a YouTube plaque for surpassing 100,000 subscribers.
Brown’s Hardware represents an earlier chapter in the same story. Founded in 1883, the store supplied materials that helped build and maintain Falls Church when it was still a village. It also served another vital role by housing the area’s only telephone connection to its only doctor.
Although Brown’s is gone, newer ventures are continuing its culture of practical community service.
The Toy Nest, a toy-lending library, celebrated its sixth anniversary on March 30 and was approaching 115,000 completed loans. Its central premise is that families do not need to own every toy their children want to explore.
Owner Lisa Bourven has also built partnerships around that idea. The Toy Nest works with Mary Riley Styles Public Library to provide toy-borrowing incentives for preschool children participating in the summer reading program. Its annual Toys for Treats Halloween candy buyback sends collected candy to city trash and maintenance workers while introducing children to the lending library.
The model gives families across income levels access to high-quality toys. Children can play, select something to take home and return it when they are finished, much as they would borrow a library book.
Repair has also become an intergenerational activity at Mary Riley Styles Public Library. The third Teddy Bear Fix It Clinic took place there March 14, transforming a conference room into a makeshift hospital for damaged stuffed animals.
Students from Meridian guided children through “triage” with support from volunteer instructors. Patients ranged from a toddler’s injured teddy bear to a stuffed lion that had belonged to a father for 47 years and needed a “hip replacement.”
The clinic kept beloved toys out of the landfill while showing children that repair can become a lifelong habit. It also brought teenagers, parents, young children and volunteer experts together through hands-on learning.
The library has additionally hosted Repair Café Fairfax, part of a movement that has connected neighbors with repair specialists for more than 15 years. At the free community event, skilled volunteers help residents fix electronics, appliances, clothes, bicycles and other broken household possessions. Its first Falls Church edition drew an enthusiastic response.
Each repaired shoe, borrowed toy, saved scrap and shared tool represents a small act. Collectively, those acts are building a local system based on a repeating principle: connect, borrow, repair, create and begin again.