Wednesday 17 December 2014

Planning for Practicum (with a question for readers)

So the call for teachers has gone out for Practicum, which is a local day of classes in February on all things historical and relevant to the SCA here in Ottawa. Last year I taught a class for the first time (Intro to Leatherworking) and I think it went pretty well.

So this year I'm trying to decide if I want to actually offer two classes, and whether or not I have the time and energy to get them both prepped.

The first class would be the same Intro class I did last year. I have some kits left so I don't think it would take too much work to prep enough for another small class.

The second is a new class I've been working on around my period leather dye project. It would be more of a discussion, rather than a hand's on class (it takes too long to make the dye and apply it to the leather and the process is just too messy and smelly to really do in that setting). The idea would be to walk through the sources of recipes, what colours would have been available and show the results of my experiments. I have permission from the publisher of the Plictho to reproduce the recipes, so people would walk away with at least a few original source recipes to play with.

The question is, would there be interest in the classes? I only got a handful of people for the intro class last year, which was fine because for a hand's on class I'd rather work with a small group. The dye class is more advanced, but still pretty specialized, so there may be a limited number of people interested (but also less prep involved in it since I don't need to make kits for people).

So, let's do a survey oh readers of the blog. If you're going to Practicum, would either of these be of interest. You can comment here or on Facebook when I share the link there, whatever's easiest. :)