A New Departure – Craft Cruises

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Off to sea and craft teaching

A new departure for me – teaching craft on a cruise ship!

I see this as my dream job, I got to combine my love of travel and exploring with my second love of teaching and sharing my skills with enthusiastic people. I had never thought about cruising around the British Isles and north France before but I would highly recommend it as a way of gaining a flavour of the beautiful Islands that surround us!

Apart from that I enjoyed the Fabulous, varied entertainment in the evenings, the talks, quizzes, the spa and best of all being served delicious food and being waited on in the restaurants on board. So many opportunities to meet people and make new friends. I have been eating salads since returning as those extra pounds need to go!!

As you will know Teaching arts and crafts is nothing new to me. My regular courses were still taking bookings whilst I was away and marketing is a never ending job! My usual classes are either 2.5hrs or 6 hrs, so fitting activities into a 1 hour ish slot and with much larger classes was all go and organisation was key! I’m glad that I was super organised and had planned ahead.

Preparation Time

I really enjoyed making up the 300 kits in total, music on and I got into the zone!! It was fun to fill a huge suitcase full of crafts and not worry about the weight of volume lol but I did have to lug the cases to the terminal!! I usually travel light with just enough clothes for my journey so x 2 cases was a challenge to load and unload!

Anyway, I’m happy to say that the weeks of preparation paid off and my classes were successful with an average of 19 people in each one, but I had 44 on the sea day :-). A much deserved G & T was welcomed afterwards lol

I’m pleased to say the feedback has been excellent with people stopping me to ask when the next class was on!

What crafts did we do?

Creative Craft Variety

I taught a few of the crafts that I have an interest in, although I have many different activities planned besides these! This time I did: jewellery making, collage, concertina book making and of course needle felted pictures and animals, my business is called Feltworld so it wouldn’t be right to miss these out!

The beaded jewellery class was popular with bracelets and necklaces were made using the kits that I had put together, over many a long evening lol, so they were all different with beautiful beads.

Collage Art

Another fun craft was collage with an antique feel or a contemporary textile collaged mounted card.

Feltmaking

Using merino fleece, alpaca and silks. My 50 kits were very popular and as you can see below, they look amazing. With limited time the finished pieces were smaller than you’d create in a full workshop but students were still able to have fun creating some beautiful designs. Other things we covered were scrap booking and memory books.

All work and no play is not good for a soul and happily I was able to go ashore when we stopped off at various ports, including Orkney, Stornoway, Belfast, Cork, Scilly Isles, and Le Harvre- Honfleur (France).

The weather was actually beautiful, we had left the rain behind at Tilbury UK and didn’t pick it up again until Guernsey.

Back to dry land

After 10 days of cruising and teaching I’m back at home and planning more of my day and half day workshops. August is always a quiet month so if you would like to request a workshop with a minimum of two people then please message me to discuss. Otherwise I have September filling up.

Creative Talks for small groups

I am also taking booking for my two talks on:

1) Rug making in Konya Turkey and

2) Exploring Bali, Charity work, Batik Painting. See here

You can find out more about my workshops on the workshop page and on my Facebook and Instagram pages.