THE second Festival of Thrift is gearing up to up-cycle your rubbish and make art out of trash. You can meet the Bubble Car Buskers, and discover how to do all sorts of useful things from turning your kitchen into a dairy, to learning how to build your own woodburning pizza oven in your back garden.

Lingfield Point’s 107-acre site is two miles east of Darlington town centre and was home to the largest wool factory in the world, Patons and Baldwins. Now 60 years later, Marchday has transformed this manufacturing base into a dynamic contemporary business community and home of The Festival of Thrift, which runs across the weekend of September 27 and 28.

No self-respecting event would dare to call itself a festival without having art, music and performance. On the main stage, meet Ida Barr, aka Christopher Green, resplendent in her pearls and lilac lace. This granny is queen of the artificial hip hop, described as musically somewhere between Lady Gaga and Lord Haw-Haw. Ida’s slipped disco sounds promising, as does her musichall meets the pump and grind of R&B. The show’s called Ida Barr’s Mash Up and performances, arrnaged by Home Live Art, will take place throughout both days.

This year the event introduces Francisco de Pajaro – a street artist from Barcelona who creates work with an unexpected twist.

Bin bags, dustbins, cardboard boxes, broken furniture and more are all seen as artistic equipment to Francisco who, by adding arms and faces, creates fun pieces of art in the form of monsters, humans and animals.

“The arrival of Francisco in Darlington, in the run up to the festival, is one that has us all very excited,” says festival director Stella Hall.

“My objective is to create a smile on people’s faces. I rarely stay to watch the reactions of the public, but in general I think my art brings enjoyment to most which in turn brings me great pleasure,” says Francisco. Watch out for his work around the streets of Darlington prior to the festival weekend.

Artists and crafty people will premiere new ideas devised especially for the weekend. Nu-urban Gardeners will be encouraging visitors to think about recycling and conservation while having fun making miniature gardens. A series of mini Gardens of Thrift fit for a thrifty 21st Century, measuring around one foot wide, will allow gardeners to explore the issues in a serious or playful fashion. Full Circle by Beccy McCray is touring installation artwork, which uses thousands of tiny holepunches, those circular bits of paper left by hole-punchers which are usually thrown away.

As you’d expect, there are plenty of yarnbased ideas like The Craftimation Factory run by Janey Moffatt, where festival-goers can make their own knitted puppets and then bring them to life through the use of stop-motion animation – along the lines of Morph, or the Clangers?

The Thrift Jack Press is a construction by Adam Bligh. He’ll make a large working press out of wood and other recycled materials. Visitors will be invited to make their own printing blocks and type using scrap materials.

Shane Waltener will be making a woven architectural installation using green waste and locally-sourced hedgerow materials.

Boasting free parking and the Arriva number 11 bus running every ten minutes, it couldn’t be easier to get there. Festivalgoers can ditch the car and get on their bikes thanks to “town on the move” initiative – Localmotion – using the borough’s cycle network that runs past Lingfield Point.

  • The Festival of Thrift is a free family festival, taking place on September 27 and 28 at Lingfield Point, Darlington. For more information on the festival including workshops, talks and demonstrations, go to festivalofthrift.co.uk for more information