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108 Educators providing Recreational courses in Newton Abbot

Little Acorn Furniture

little acorn furniture

5.0(53)

Exeter

Working with the materials available in our surrounding countryside to produce unique and beautiful things and simultaneously provide value and management incentives to improve our precious local woodlands. Having graduated with an Honours Degree in Aerospace Engineering of all things Alasdair eventually found himself working in South London as an Elevator Engineer. This highly unsuitable lifestyle resulted in a three year VSO teaching placement in Ghana, where Alasdair found the inspiration he was looking for and returned to the UK to study for an MSc. in Environmental Forestry in Bangor, North Wales. After a brief stint working for the University, and determined never to work indoors again, Alasdair secured a Woodland Rangers post with the National Trust and spent the next ten years caring for and working with coastal native woodland and parkland in Gwynedd and Anglesey. During this time he discovered that engineering, teaching and a passion for woods and wood work were the ideal ingredients for his own venture. When the chance arose to move with his young family to South Devon, Little Acorn Furniture was born. In addition to furniture making and greenwood courses, Alasdair operates Little Acorn Forestry providing a range of forestry and conservation services from management planning to tree felling, planting and invasive species control. This often provides a sustainable source of local material for Little Acorn Furniture and the two elements provide an environmentally beneficial service quite literally from tree to table, or chair or whatever else it is you may require.

Oak And Smoke Tannery

oak and smoke tannery

Moretonhampstead

Oak and Smoke Tannery is dedicated to Natural Tanning and Traditional Leatherwork. Oak and Smoke Tannery is made up of Jane Robertson and Jessie Watson Brown. We are two individuals with a passion for the wildness in nature and the skills that enable us to live closely to the earth. Through this journey… we discovered tanning! The tanning processes we practise use only natural ingredients – locally harvested tree barks such as Oak and Willow, oils and Smoke. We tan and sell leather, rawhide and unique leather handcrafts. The Heritage Crafts association has categorised tanning as ‘critically endangered’ as a craft because there are so few people practising it and even less teaching it. We intend to demystify the art of tanning by teaching simple methods, with simple tools. This is how we were taught and how we still practise. We learned tanning in Washington State in America and more recently from traditional tanners in Scandinavia.  We love the discovery of learning how different skins and processes work, and seeing the alchemical change that they go through during the tanning process. When we first returned from America lots of people were asking us to teach them tanning so we set up our first hide camp. The first year was small with a group of friends, and it was a booming success. Since then its grown and grown every year and now we run numerous camps every year, as well as guest teaching on other courses and offering individual tuition. All this as well as of course tanning leather ourselves on Dartmoor and in Mid Wales. We would love to see tanning become normal in peoples homes, as it once would have been. Most of the UK's domestic animal skins get exported to other countries or tanned in chemically intensive commercial tanneries, and most wild animal skins are wasted - its heart breaking! We have very high standards when it comes to ethics and the environment [https://www.oakandsmoketannery.co.uk/ethics]. All our skins are by-products of farming and hunting, otherwise discarded.

Coombe Farm Studios

coombe farm studios

Devon

Coombe is a small-scale rural centre, dedicated to growing creativity. It’s a place where you can develop new skills, supported by a beautiful environment, great food & people who actively enable the creative process. It’s also a place to make and show work, connect with nature and get inspired. We opened in 1983, it was one of the first small artist-led centres offering week-long creative courses. Since then, over the past 35 years, we are lucky to have developed an amazing network of people from all over the world. Our core activity is a mix of tutored art retreats that run year-round, bespoke projects for the creative community and showcasing new work on and off site. We celebrate difference, enjoy the messy ways of the creative process, celebrating the tricky bits, sharing in the successes and frustrations, encouraging others to explore and share the process of making. We are interested in cultivating wisdom, courage and wonder, and we believe in action. We collaborate and look for synergies with others, to ensure that we, as well as the people we work with, aren’t burnt out, bored, disillusioned or skint, but rather nourished, inspired, committed, passionate, and working within resource limits. Our small-scale allows us to be attentive to the simple things we believe make a great place to create, learn and research – skills-based tuition from passionate professions, a relaxed atmosphere, a beautiful environment, delicious food and great company.

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