Enriching Students Learning through Maker Visits, Exhibitions, Trade Visits and Guest Tutors!
We couldn’t quite fit all of our visits this year into the picture grid above!
It’s been a bumper year for visits, exhibitions and talks, with 17 in total!
The students all agree that the visits and talks have been incredibly successful in enriching their experience here in a number of ways.
We have found our Designer Maker visits particularly popular with the students. We usually pick a day when we can visit two or three Designer Makers from a region. The makers are often chosen because they are a specialist in their area of work, or their work reflects a particular style, or their furniture business reflects a stage many of the students hope to achieve - and we ask them to talk about how they have successfully built their furniture business and developed their design style.
Our recent visit to William Garvey’s was of interest not just because they are a worlds class leading bespoke furniture workshop, but also because 35 years ago, they mastered the concept of creating a water tight wooden bath from Teak - a process our students were keen to hear more about.
We are regular visitors to Vastern’s Timber Yard and Tyler Hardwoods, where we are fortunate to receive excellent talks from Tom at Vasterns and Geoff/Liam at Tylers on their timbers and drying processes. It is also a great opportunity for our tutor Justin to teach the students about timber selection and what to look for when buying wood.
We do encourage the students to visit industry exhibitions and design shows, and to this end, we enjoy taking the students to 100% Design, Masterpiece and the London Design Fair each year. Attending exhibitions is an excellent way for students to keep abreast of trends of the industry, new materials being used in furniture making, and to look at the way the industry presents and markets it’s work and brands.
Balancing time out of the workshop with precious time in the workshop, we also arrange for visiting tutors, experts in particular fields of furniture making and trade demonstrations to come to the workshop. Next week we have one of the countries most experienced steam bending experts - Charlie Whinney - coming to run a days workshop with our students. In the morning they will learn about steam bending theory (Big bends, knots and twists) and making individual projects in the afternoon such as lampshades, bowls and sculptures.
This year, we’ve also had visiting talks and demonstrations from Bruce Hodgson (Founder of Artichoke Ltd) on successfully building a bespoke furniture business, and visiting demonstrations from Lamello and Axminster Tools - to compliment the many demonstrations that out tutors also run.
We’re already planning our visits for next year, the first being two designer makers whose work we very much admire - Shaw Stephens and Lomas Furniture based in South Devon!