The love of crafting

Tina Dunham has always enjoyed crafting. One of the first crafts she told us about was making clothes for dolls. While she makes the doll heads herself using moulds, she prefers making the clothes and accessories and finds the painting process to be the best part of moulding the heads.

Tina makes all the accessories themselves including mohair wigs, and sometimes real hair wigs. She’s knitted socks on wire needles for their feet, felted the wool for them and takes pride in all the little details.

Her real love is sewing. As a child her father saw no point in her having a career as she’d just get married, and Tina took that as a challenge. After getting a job at a mens suit company, she broke ceilings by becoming the first women to get laid leave from her job to attend a polytechnic course to further her career in fabrics. This was newspaper worthy, and she made certain to learn a lot though she never was allowed into the mens only cutting room.

Her love of fabrics and sewing have taken her to amazing places around the world, and her work has been featured on magazines. She’s continued to take classes to learn new techniques and is enjoying life to the fullest.

Recently she was part of a team who recreated New Zealand’s first rugby jersey worn overseas, back when it was blue. Through hard work she was able to track down the original stencils used for the fern, the original machines the fabric was woven on and the patterns used. Replicas were made for sale, with a limited run of 12, and one replica hangs in the Palmerston North Rugby Museum.

One is cheekily hung overseas as well. Tina convinced the curators to move over some of their own teams history to center the New Zealand jersey proudly. Where there’s an opportunity, Tina will take it!

We had a good show and tell as well, welcoming the year in with style!