Sip and sew!

Ingenius - if you like sewing.

Sewing cafe opens in Paris

Rent a sewing machine by the hour, learn a new skill or simply sip cafe au lait

Lizzy Davies

• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 April 2010 22.00 BST

Martena Duss (left) and Sissi Holleis at the Sweat Shop cafe in Paris. Photograph: Munia Sbouri

Perched at a worktable strewn with pins, needles and colourful balls of thread, Martena Duss and Sissi Holleis are chatting over coffee when Ellinor Duhs comes in for her afternoon apple juice. A chic septuagenarian with flame-red hair piled on top and fingers laden with costume jewellery, she settles down at a Formica table and takes out a half-finished tapestry. "It is Bauhaus inspired," she explains, adding with a cackle: "I excel at everything that is of no use."

Amid cups of coffee and slices of cake, frivolity and industry are the order of the day at the Sweat Shop, Paris's only sewing cafe, which Duss and Holleis opened last month in a quiet street near the trendy bars and boutiques of the Canal Saint Martin.

A Swiss makeup artist and an Austrian fashion designer, the pair came to the world fashion capital expecting to be wowed by Gallic savoir faire. Instead, they found a city in which the relationship between ordinary people and the hallowed workshops of the great couturiers had broken down to the extent that – sacre bleu! – their French friends were asking to borrow their sewing machines.

Sewing machines for hire at Sweat Shop cafe, Paris. Photograph: Munia Sbouri

So they decided to open a friendly workshop where budding seamstresses and enthusiastic amateurs could practise their art while sipping an espresso or munching on Martena's herb-laden Finnish cake. Along the lines of a typical internet cafe, users can purchase access to a Singer sewing machine – six euros an hour – and come to classes in the evening if they want to improve, for example, their knitting or customising skills. The idea, say the owners, is to reconnect people with the joys of sartorial DIY.

"We want to stimulate people to have a personal relationship again with their clothes," says Duss. "In the last 100 years we have become estranged from the product. We live in such a consumer society. But if you make your own sweater you have a different relationship with it. You get closer to the product."

Three weeks in, and business is already gathering steam. The clientele is mixed, with fashion students and vintage shoppers rubbing shoulders with children and older women who, like Duhs, enjoy the conversation as much as the craft. One customer, 32-year-old Julie Hervé, has signed up to the couture class in order to "perfect" her technique. "I like doing a bit of stitching but I don't know how to do it really well," she says. "This place seems very nice and it makes a good change from work."

If the project succeeds in Paris, where handicraft is largely absent from the education system and still suffers from connotations of hippiedom and dowdiness, perhaps it could catch on elsewhere. Manchester, and London, maybe?

"There's a crowd for it," says Holleis, her heels clacking on the broken tiled floor. To her left, a counter of cakes stands alluringly in the Parisian sunshine, and the Singers sit on tables ready to whirr.