Winnie Crough keeps a sewing kit at her school desk, ready to doctor a fellow classmate’s stuffed animal in need.
“I’m open to anything that you have, anyone that needs stuffed animals,” Winnie said. “If they can find me, I’m always willing to fix them.”
Winnie, 10 but very soon going on 11, hosted one of the more than 30 stations Saturday at the annual How-To Festival. The free Lawrence Public Library event invites community members to exchange their miscellaneous knowledge and talents.
“I once actually had a customer, she’s got this giant penguin stuffed animal that had burst at the seam in its back, and it just kept growing and growing and growing,” Winnie said. “So they put some duct tape over it and waited for a while because they didn’t really know what to do, until I told her that I could easily fix it, and she brought it to school, and my teacher gave me an extra 15 minutes to sew it up.”
One stop on Ava Skinner and Bowie Skinner’s day out with their grandmother, Monica Zylstra, was the How-To Festival. At Winnie’s station, they learned how to sew up a plushie. Ava said one of her other favorites at the festival was Julie Kong’s station on tagging Monarch butterflies.
“We’ve done the stitching, we did the decals, we did the origami, tried out the cucumber salad, and the bees are amazing,” Zylstra said. “We’re gonna go and look at more tables and then possibly check out some books while we’re here.”
Making a window decal requires glass or plastic surfaces, liquid leading, stained glass effect paint and a design, Victoria Garcia Unzueta shared with How-To Festival-goers. Since her mom worked at a craft store, she’s always known her way around art supplies, and now making decals by hand serves as a personal hobby and produces gifts for friends.
Meeting new people, places and cultures ties with Jeff Miller’s love for exploration, and he found bicycling was his favorite mode of transportation.
He shared on Saturday that it’s possible to travel the world by bike, as he has. His favorite visits have been to El Salvador and Ecuador, but he said folks can start small by using the Lawrence Loop and other Kansas trails, and an old kitty litter bucket can be converted into a bicycle gear carrier.
“It can be an amazing activity for helping to kind of center yourself and reorganize your thinking and just find a strength within yourself that maybe you didn’t know was there before,” Miller said.
Kimberly Comstock showed folks how she turns flax into linen.
An organization she works with, Kaw Point Fibershed, advocates for a soil-to-soil system in which garments are composted when no longer usable and the nourishment will produce new, sustainable fibers.
“Gong fu” roughly translates to “to do something will skill.” Christina Hauck demonstrated technique brewing a type of Japanese black tea that she said is perfect for a relaxed social gathering.
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Maya Hodison (she/her), equity reporter, can be reached at mhodison@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
Nathan Kramer (he/him), a multimedia student journalist for The Lawrence Times since August 2024, is a senior at Free State High School. He is also a news photo editor for Free State’s student publication, where he works as a videographer, photographer and motion designer. See more of his work for the Times here.
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