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TOG Repair Café at BuzzFest in Phibsboro

We’re taking the TOG repair tools to Phibsboro this Saturday, 3 October, for BuzzFest.

BuzzFest is Phibsboro Village Tidy Towns’ community, sustainability and biodiversity festival. We’ll be running a Repair Café where you can bring along a small broken item and sit down with a volunteer to see what can be done. Small electrical appliances, electronics, toys, jewellery and clothing are among the things the Repair Café can look at.

The idea is to work on the item together. We can’t promise every repair will succeed, but we’ll give it a good look and help you understand what might be wrong.

The festival is free to visit, with stalls, talks, workshops, music and food throughout the afternoon. Please book a Repair Café slot in advance, as space at the repair tables is limited.

Event details

  • When: Saturday 3 October 2026, 12:30 pm to 4 pm
  • Where: Panama Scout Hall, Royal Canal Bank, Phibsborough, behind Phibsboro Library
  • Cost: Free

Book your Repair Café slot here, or find out more about BuzzFest.

Thanks to Phibsboro Village Tidy Towns for inviting us. We look forward to seeing what turns up on the repair tables.

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Embroidery machine workshop – monograms

Three towels with the word Tog embroidered in various fonts

The first in a series of workshops with our new embroidery machine will be about learning the lettering tool in Ink/Stitch to make monograms.

A monogram is a short one to three letter embellishment. You’ll find them on towels, napkins, fancy dressing gowns and so on. They can be a person or company’s initials, though for Tog we figured we’d just put all three letters on.

At the workshop, you’ll learn how ink/stitch’s Lettering Tool works and create your own monogram. You’ll learn how to set up a basting box around a design in case it’s needed. Then you’ll learn how to hoop up items like towels and napkins, align your pattern, and then stitch out your monogram! All embroidery supplies will be provided along with a towel each.

A close up of the embroidery machine adding a pink letter T to a towel.

For the workshop, bring your laptop with inkscape already installed and think about which one to three letters you want to embroider. Towels will be provided, but if you want to bring additional items like a napkin or handkerchief, we can see if there’s time after the class to embroider those with your design.

A finished monogram in the hoop. IT's a grey towel with Tog in orange and yellow letters in a purple circle.

The class costs €15 for non-Tog members and €10 for members. Book your ticket here. Keep an eye on the events page or our meetup.com page to be notified of future workshops (there will be many!).

Sunday 27th September 1530-1730

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New toy! An industrial embroidery machine!

A tog member stands in front of the embroidery machine, showing off a piece of embroidery in a hoop

If you’ve been in the space recently, you might have see our newest toy tool, a 12 colour, industrial, embroidery machine! Many of our members are very excited about it, so we started showing members how to use it and will be opening it up to a wider audience in the coming weeks with workshops on how to design for embroidery machines.

The machine is a secondhand ZSK Sprint 5, made in Germany in 2012. It’s passed through a few hands before coming to us, but it’s in great condition, and we’re going to get many years of use out of it yet! It’s able to embroider areas up to 30 by 30 cm and can automatically change colours and cut the threads. We also have a cap attachment for it, but let’s start with flatter surfaces first.

A grey hoop with grey fabric mounted in it. the numbers 1 to 12 are stitched out in different colours. Apart from 8 which appears to be mangled.

As it’s a 90 kg beast, one of our members built a table to handle the weight. We’ve put the machine in the small room with the laser cutter as it’s quite noisy, but it tends to move a lot, so we couldn’t put it upstairs by the 3D printers or they’d be very sad.

A metal legged table with a box top made from OSB and a nice bit of ply

Of course, as a hackerspace, we’re not out buying the manufacturer’s closed software but we are delighted to be able to use a variety of open source software with it. The machine takes .dst files, which are an industry standard supported by many open source tools. The main workhorse software is Inkscape with the plugin Ink/Stitch. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s extremely flexible. There’s also the option to use PEmbroider with Processing, and we can’t forget TurtleStitch for those interested in machine embroidery as an educational tool as well as for art. Expect some design workshops to pop up over the coming months!

If you simply want to gaze at its majesty, drop in on any of our open evenings. On craft night, you’re most likely to find the machine embroidery nerds, so pack a craft project and stick around after getting to know our newest toy and its biggest fans.

An early test embroider. The white fabric is still mounted in the hoop. It has a black duck with the text tog.ie in green. Below that is testing testing one two
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TOG at the Kildare Amateur Radio Buy & Sell Extravaganza

The TOG radio crew will be heading to County Kildare on Sunday, 18 October, for the Kildare Amateur Radio Club Buy & Sell Extravaganza.

We will have a TOG and EI0TOG table at the event, so come over and say hello. We will be happy to chat about the hackerspace, our radio shack, our amateur radio activities and the projects our members have been working on.

The event brings together amateur radio operators, CB operators, shortwave listeners, clubs and traders from across the island of Ireland. It is an opportunity to buy, sell or swap surplus radio equipment—or simply meet old friends and talk radio.

There should be a wide range of equipment available, including radios, antennas, receivers, power supplies, SWR and power meters, antenna tuners, handheld radios, repeaters, cables, fittings and plenty more.

Event details

Date: Sunday, 18 October 2026
Time: 11am to 1:30pm
Venue: Kill GAA Football Club, Kill Village, Co. Kildare
Eircode: W91 XP95
Admission: €5 per person; children under 12 go free

There is ample parking at the clubhouse, with easy access from the N7 and M7.

The clubhouse bar will open at 12 noon for refreshments, with lunches available from 12:30pm onwards.

Anyone who has surplus equipment to sell can book a table free of charge by emailing info@kildarearc.com. Traders will be admitted from 10am to allow time to set up.

Further details are available from the Kildare Amateur Radio Club:

Kildare Amateur Radio Club – EI0K

We are looking forward to meeting everyone on the day. We will also try not to return to TOG with more radio equipment than we brought—but no promises.

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The Autumn Reset: Repair Café in Clondalkin

We are taking the TOG repair tools on the road again.

On Thursday 17 September, TOG volunteers will be at Ace Enterprise Park in Bawnogue for a free Repair Café. The event is part of The Autumn Reset, Ace Enterprise Park’s Circular Economy Week.

Do you have a broken household item sitting at home? Bring it along and see if we can help give it another chance.

At a Repair Café, the idea is not simply to hand something over to be fixed. You sit down with a volunteer repairer, open it up together and try to work out what has gone wrong. We cannot promise that everything can be repaired, but we will give it a good look and hopefully share some useful skills along the way.

Repair Cafés help keep useful items in service for longer, reduce waste and make repair a little less mysterious.

Event details

  • Date: Thursday 17 September 2026
  • Time: 12:00 to 16:00
  • Location: Ace Enterprise Park, Bawnogue, Dublin 22
  • Eircode: D22 P6E8
  • Cost: Free
  • Free parking is available on site.

Full details and free registration are available on Eventbrite.

The Autumn Reset continues on Friday 18 September with a Community Clothing Swap.

Thanks to Ace Enterprise Park for inviting us. We look forward to seeing what turns up on the repair tables.

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Repair, Radio and a Bicycle: Clonmel to Waterford

Read all about our member Jeffrey‘s trip to The Circular Square.

On Saturday 5 September I put my bicycle on an Irish Rail train in Dublin and headed south to Clonmel. With the bike safely in its rack and the panniers packed, it was a pleasantly straightforward start to a three-day trip running through to Monday 7 September.

The main reason for travelling was a weekend of repair and Linux workshops at The Circular Square. Around that, I had plans for some cycling, portable amateur radio and a little monument photography. It sounds like several different weekends packed into one, but they fitted together rather well.

Continue reading “Repair, Radio and a Bicycle: Clonmel to Waterford”