Traditional Skills Workshop, July, Mid Wales

[sally]

Gareth and I have been booked to provide a two day Traditional Skills workshop at Renew in mid Wales on the 7 & 8 July 2012
http://renew.midwales.org.uk/events

The sessions are loosely inspired by a series of early historical skills and materials, but the idea is to look at using wider bushcraft skills and low-technology methods to bring these up to date to offer an introduction to a wide range of skills and methods that may well be useful and adaptable to re-enactors doing a wide range of historic periods. We are happy to update the information in the course to suit specific datelines if we know in advance what people's areas of interest are.

There are still spaces on this, its only £60 for the whole weekend, and we will be covering a wide range of skills over two fun and varied days. Natural dyes (particularly woad, weld and madder- three classics from right across most of the periods of interest on this forum), making soap from woodash lye, how to build an earth oven and cook on an open fire, plus metalworking (mostly Iron Age style repousse techniques) and drop spinning, cord making and fibre sorting. Feltmaking could also be covered if desired.

This weekend has been subsidised by the organisers to keep the cost down and it would be fab to get a few more people attending, please feel free to mention it anywhere else you may think might attract some attention.

[Karina]

Thanks Sally, looks very interesting, I have hopefully booked a place via the link.

[sally]

fabulous! Will look forwards to seeing you. If you want anything specific covering, just let us know

[Karina]

Yes, looking forward to seeing you too. It all looks good, I have done a little (a very little) dyeing, carding wool and weaving on a peg loom but could do with going through it again, but I will be particularly interested in the soap making and making an earth oven, but I have to be honest and admit that it's all new to me. I re enact Tudor at the moment but may be looking to move to an earlier time period in the near future and I am just trying to broaden my knowledge, and you are of course the guru of historical soap making so I couldn't pass this up.

[sally]

Anyone else thinking of coming along- just a reminder that although this is mostly about getting to grips with some classic techniques, we are happy to tailor the methods and information to be more applicable to specific datelines and to help people work on ways of incorporating their new skills into their current displays

[sally]

One final plug for this, there are still a few places available

[Bad Viking]

I would be interested in herbology - medicinal herbs - ( not whakky ba ba bakky !) or any type of bushcraft /medieval medicine !!

[sally]

We can certainly talk herbs if you are coming to this, its not planned in as a major element of this particular session in as much as there probably won't be time to set up salves and alembics etc, but there will certainly be time to chat about how to best incorporate herbs into your current repertoire and to have a look at some of the evidence and transferrable techniques. Let me know if you do book and I'll make sure I bring some additional materials for this