The Antigua Rotary Club mounted an exhibition last Saturday of the items produced by members of its sewing classes being conducted in several communities.
Starting in the Grays-Green community back in 2009, the sewing classes have spread in close to a dozen communities in the years since with a new one starting every other year.
The exhibition was held at Rotary House on Nugent Avenue and it featured craft and other items produced by sewing classes from Pigotts, Potters, Willikies, Sea View Farm, Jennings/Bolans and Pares Village among others.
“Usually, the women attending these classes start off by making an apron and over time they graduate to making more complex items where in one case one woman made a suit for her husband,” coordinator of the programme Cordell Josiah stated.
He said the Rotary Club provides materials for the programme and machines are provided by a sister Rotary Club from Washington State in the USA.
According to Josiah while he can’t say that any of the women who attend the sewing classes now take up sewing as a full-time job, he said many are making their own dresses, shirts, table cloths, mats, pot holders and bags among other items.
He said the Rotary Club is pleased to announced that over the course of the several years that the programme has been inexistence, more than five hundred women have benefitted. The Club provides professional seamstresses who provide the instruction at the classes.
He said the next project is to establish a sewing class in Barbuda. That he announced is ‘on the horizon’.
