Hybrid Services has provided digitally printed patterns for the For the Love of Scrubs campaign.
The company, the UK and Ireland distributor for Mimaki, used a 1.6m Mimaki UCJV300-160, to produce patterns for the nearby Leighton Hospital and further afield.
‘One of the team spotted a Facebook post appealing for help with producing the patterns,’ said Brett Newman, Hybrid’s chief operations manager. ‘As soon as we realised we could help, a number of the Hybrid staff volunteered to assist, returning to our office to produce the plans at A0 size to help the group with this challenge.’
The project came about after sewist Emma Dalzell set up an offshoot of the national ‘For the Love of Scrubs,’ to serve the Cheshire area.
‘Having joined the national Facebook group, I thought I’d make a couple of pairs and that would be it, but in conversation with a contact at Crewe’s Leighton Hospital, I found there was a desperate need for scrubs in our area which motivated me to start the local group,’ Ms Dalzell said. ‘In the space of three weeks since its inception in early April, it now has around 1000 members and covers towns across Cheshire, from Macclesfield in the east, to Tarporley in the west and extends south into Shropshire.
‘We have volunteer sewists funding their own fabric, sewing groups pooling their efforts and even non-sewing volunteers who drive and distribute the material. But one of our biggest challenges has been sourcing patterns.’
These are typically printed on paper, with the various sizes of each panel of the garment represented at 100% scale. The sewist cuts out the appropriate panel, pins it to the fabric before cutting that out and making up the garment. ‘Once we’d found the suitable pattern design, a lot of our members were printing them at home and sticking the A4 pages together, which as well as being time consuming can lead to potential issues with incorrect scaling,’ Ms Dalzell concluded.
