AS the eldest of nine children, Stella Hall learnt the art of thrift at a very young age. She took the creative skills needed to revive old clothes and mend broken items into adulthood and combined them with her love of the arts.

Her creativity and vision has led to a successful 25-year career in events management and Stella is now returning to organise a large-scale festival in the town where she took the first steps in her career; Darlington.

More than three decades ago Stella completed a placement at Darlington Arts Centre while studying at London’s City University. She returned last year to organise the Festival of Thrift at Lingfield Point and is back to direct the festival again.

She hopes to build on the debut event’s success which saw 27,000 visitors attend. Among the names already on the bill for the 2014 festival is Spanish artist Francisco De Pajaro whose striking political street art has sprung up across Western Europe.

He is currently artist in residence in New York and Stella admits that he is likely to be her personal highlight of this year’s festival. Another colourful character on the bill is Ida Barr, a musical character created by comedy performer Christopher Green whom Stella says will be “encouraging the people of Darlington to discover skills they didn’t know they had”.

These and other new additions will appear alongside festival favourites from last year such as the camper vans turned bistros and Stella explains what she believes the festival’s appeal is: “It caught the spirit of the time,” she says. “We are living through a recessionary period. We are at that period now where we are looking to regain lost skills and build community at a time after a period where it was every person for themselves. We are in a period where we are thinking ‘what can we do together’. My background is the arts, so I am thinking ‘what can we do as artists together’.”

Stella, who lives in Whitley Bay, is not just an events organiser. She has recently completed a six-month programme to promote the arts and sustainable projects in Kazakhstan, at the request of the British Council. Her role included meeting politicians and businessmen to see what the countries could learn from each other. She described the experience as “fascinating,” adding: “It was great for me to go and talk about green issues and event management and get them excited about the possibility of recycling and upcycling.

"It is very new over there – I didn’t see any evidence of it - although they do have an eco-festival.”

And though there are things that the Kazakhstan people can learn from the West, Stella said it was important that the exchange of information and ideas was a two-way thing. “There is a huge sense of pride in the people who were essentially nomads,” she says. “A lot of our pride and heritage comes from buildings; their great sense of pride and culture is very different to ours.

"Their capital city has only been a capital city for twenty years because they have been wanderers so they don’t necessarily see their culture as being fixed in bricks and mortar; it is in relationships and a sense of community. We can certainly learn from that.”

Thankfully the sense of community amongst artists and performers in Darlington is still thriving, despite the closure of the town’s Arts Centre two-years-ago. Many were involved in the first Festival of Thrift and Stella said she first step to holding a successful event is listening to the community.

“You ask; what is Darlington proud of? What does it celebrate? And of course we are at a place in Lingfield Point that is part of the history,” says Stella, who is referencing the site’s original purpose as the Paton’s and Baldwin wool factory in the 1950s. Heritage is a key theme of this year’s festival and Stella hopes that a modern celebration of the old will once again prove to be a recipe for success. She says: “We did a debrief a couple of weeks after the first festival, everybody came together to talk about what worked, what didn’t work and what we wanted to strive for. More music, more technical stuff, more dedication to heritage, more about sustainability. And I think we have managed to do all that. We want people to come onsite and be a little bit surprised.”

*The Festival of Thrift takes place on September 27 and 28. Updates will be posted on the festival facebook page and at festivalofthrift.co.uk