New classes on the way!
First of all, I have absolutely no idea why the titles as so utterly ginormous here on this Squarespace-hosted website/blog page, and can only express my sincerest apologies. I’ve tried in vain to edit it, to no avail. Thankfully it won’t be too long until we move our hosting to a new shiny website designed and developed by a proper website developer, and then this won’t be an issue going forward :-) Now that’s off my chest, on with the news!
We have just finished our first block of parent and child sewing classes at the Dunblane Centre, which funnily enough is in Dunblane. I learned so, so much from these first two months, realised that eight year olds really can concentrate on sewing for two straight hours without a break, I have become more organised (not easy for my AuDHD brain at times), I have taught again which was lovely (and realised I really don’t need to get extremely anxious beforehand) and had a lovely time meeting new people. And we have given (freelance) employment to a lovely and talented textile artist, which is one of the key goals of what we hope to achieve (supporting textile artists, and paying them fairly using Scottish Artists’ Union rates). One unexpected thing to come from these two months was how much the mums got out of coming along with their kids, and how it has spurred them on to do more sewing themselves at home.
We have decided to book a block of three months - April, May and June- at the Dunblane Centre for Saturday mornings, 10.30am - 12.30pm, following feedback we got from the parents and children. We have decided against classes on Sundays simply because both myself and Nikkita (our textile artist) love our Sundays, although I may well make an occasional allowance in the future for adult classes.
The classes are all available on a ‘pay what you can afford’ basis. We truly hope that those who can afford the full £12 a week (£6 per hour including good quality materials really is a bargain in our humble opinion!) will pay the full amount as we have a lot of costs running these classes . As a social enterprise, we are not in this to make any profit but we do need to make sure we don’t run at a loss either (especially now we don’t have the safety net of any funding at the moment).
So what will we be covering in the new block of classes?
We are going to build on what we taught for the first two months. We know that some of our families will be continuing with us, and that the children have already started off really well with their sewing. We also know that there will be new families joining us who might not know how to sew, so we will be making sure that whatever we teach will be accessible to everyone. In primary schools it’s common for teachers to offer differentiated activities (kids are usually split up on to different tables according to ability) so we will basically be doing something similar, but hopefully it won’t be glaringly obvious. We might need to spend a bit more time with our newer sewists, but we know that everyone will be very understanding.
We will be basing our classes around the skills of embroidery, basic sewing and developing our skills in using simple patterns. We will be looking too at how we can make best use of materials we already have and starting to look at repair and reuse of clothes and textiles.
Why parent and child classes?
Scottish textile heritage crafts are in a complete mess. I am not going to use this space to have a rant today, except to say if we want to preserve heritage crafts such as kiltmaking then we are going to have to teach our young folks to sew, so that when they are young adults they will have the requisite skills to enable them to train as kiltmakers (this applies to pretty much any craft). Sadly we are faced with a situation where sewing is not really taught in schools in Scotland any more, hence the reason for this charity’s existance.
